I got my first programming job when I was about 21, with a small company that didn't really want me to finish community college. 11 years later, I thought that maybe I was tired of programming, so I finally got my degree in mechanical engineering... just in time for a big slump in the engineering field.
However, since I had the magic piece of paper, I was able to get a temporary programming job at a manufacturing company that wanted someone familiar with 3-D geometry, and I still remembered enough of my calculus to satisfy them. So I was back in programming.
Looking back on it, my age and small-company experience helped - I had more work experience than Danny Newbie just out of college, and was willing to be paid the same (it was nearly half again what I had been making!). And after that, I was back to being a programmer - just a better-paid and better-treated one.
Since then, I've come to the conclusion that I probably would've made a competent engineer - but I'm a happier programmer.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can't figure out what it is."
And if you then return the car to the dealership afterward (translate: you uninstall the software), cool. I got no gripe with that (for what that's worth - I don't see my ethical dilemmas being a major factor in your decisions:) ).
Did you copy the entire journal? And did you pass those copies on to your friends so that they didn't have to pay for their own copy? Then, yes, the journal should come knocking on your door.
Justify it all you want, pretty it up as much as you can, what you are doing is basically taking what isn't yours, because you want it but don't want to pay for it. If you don't think that's theft, then we don't have a whole lot more to discuss.
Cool. You borrow the game, the way you'd borrow a microwave, or a car, or an arc welder.
Except your rationalization breaks down when you consider that when you "borrow" a game by putting it on your computer as well as on your friend's computer. At that point, you are creating a new microwave, or a new car or a new arc welder. (How else are you and your friend able to use it at the same time?)
It's like taking a book and photocopying the pages so that your friend doesn't have to go and buy his/her own copy, but it doesn't seem to cost you anything, so why not?
And then you wonder how come the good video game developers don't stay in the business?
Perhaps you're right. I've sometimes taken remarks like that and misunderstood them.
The problem with personal peeves is that sometimes one misreads the intent of another's statement, and I may have done that here. Thank you for gently raising that point.
So, the rationale for pirating games is "they're crummy anyway"?
Isn't that like stealing a car off a dealer's lot, and then saying "Why's everyone so upset? It was a lemon anyway...."?
I'm not meaning to moralize here. I mean, I can see the reasoning used - "I'm poor, I can't afford to buy it, someone's willing to share it, so why not?"
But to then rationalize it as "and it was crummy to begin with" is going too far. It was the reason given for some software I helped write getting pirated, and so it's admittedly a personal peeve.
Sometimes it may sound like one voice, but it ain't.
I wish you weren't anonymous - I'd mark you "friend" for reminding me about that.
I'm not looking for unaninimity (sp?) of opinion here. I realize that if you put three random Slashdot posters here, you are likely to get six trolls - each one's opinion of the other two. It's when you have the same people espousing both ends that I get aggravated.
What bugs me about this is how some people spend time writing up bitingly barbed and highly satirical screeds about the monumental stupidity of common users. "Imagine this bozo trying to set up a home network like he was a real sysadmin," they sneer. "And the whole time he doesn't realize that the brand of router he's using has a vulnerability somewhere deep in the firmware. If I'd been him, I'd have spent more money and more time, but instead this poor sap gets to deal with what his ignorance has unleashed...." and so on, ad nauseam.
The reason it annoys me is because, when these people are caught piggybacking onto their next-door neighbor's wireless, they then post that "this whole debate is silly, anyway, because the airwaves are free to everybody, and it's unfair to expect someone not to take advantage of such an unexpected bounty, and anyway the neighbor wasn't using that much of it in the first place, and he had it coming for not securing his network...."
Someone once said that "fiction is lies told about others that tell the truth about ourselves." Anything with decent story-telling causes many to provide the "willing suspension of disbelief" needed for good stories that cause us to care about the characters.
Add the interactive aspect of games, and the situation is magnified. At one point, Homeworld gives the player an enemy race that the story later shows to have been an offshoot of the player's race that went collectively crazy. I myself found that to be an affecting image. (For that matter, I actually found myself saying "Break out the #10 can of whoop-ass!" out loud when I was having to rescue a neutral-but-friendly force from attack.)
So, I'd say that, regardless of the medium, it should not be a big suprise that something that involves so much of your attention also acquires some emotional capital as well.
The parent post needs to be modded down. After all, this is a forum for serious discussion for important issues, rather than someplace for people to whine about other people's posts like this... wait a minute...
"People deserve the government they get and get the government they deserve."
And if the people of Louisiana are so convinced that video games are such a menace that they require laws like this, then by $DEITY they deserve their government!
There was an "Addams Family" episode - the old black-and-white TV series - where Uncle Fester, in his outrage at someone, grabs his gun and announces his solution: "I'll shoot him in the back!"
In this episode, Morticia responds, "Now, now, Uncle Fester, you'll do no such thing."
"In the side?" suggests Fester.
"No," Morticia answers firmly. "We shall settle this issue through legal channels."
Fester looks doubtful. "Shooting's safer," he points out.
You're probably right, that on legal and moral grounds, the concepts don't hold up. The problem is that, with as litigious as our society has become, neither legality nor morality seem to hold. It frequently turns out to be cheaper for the makers of WidgetWorx to settle than to fight the good fight.
The problem with vendor honesty is that it backfires on the vendor.
Let us suppose that WidgetWorx version 1.1 gets shipped. Inside the package is a list that says, "at the time of shipment, these are known bugs/shortcomings/issues."
An ambulance service that uses WidgetWorx for their dispatching service, and something goes wrong that leads to a patient dying. Said patient's estate could hire a savvy lawyer who would make a wrongful death claim against the ambulance service for "using a software package with known defects, thus indicating negligence." Even if the package did not have anything to do with the patient's death, it would be an indication of careless behavior and "lack of due diligence" by the ambulance service.
The ambulance service (or its insurance company), in turn, would sue the manufacturers of WidgetWorx to recoup their losses... and the list of issues would make it a slam-dunk.
I'm not denying that "vendor honesty" as you describe it would be a good thing in a perfect world. Unfortunately, this world, like my grammar, ain't perfect.
When Larry Niven first wrote "The Jigsaw Man" in the 1960's, he showed the idea of a loop driven entirely by positive feedback.
His story chronicled in sidebars the idea of the organ banks as a means to use execution to benefit society. "If the odds broke right, a convicted axe murderer could end up saving more lives than he took." The problem was that (1) there was a limited number of people eligible to put into the organ banks, and (2) an increasing number of people needing organs from the organ banks. As an organ bank would be like any other bank -- they can only put out what comes into them -- they needed additional means to fill them. Thus, the government (supported by the law-abiding voters who could never see themselves being in this position) proceeded to add criminal offenses whose punishment would help replenish the organ banks. Attempted murder, armed criminal action, burglary, and so on, were added to the list of offenses. Finally, when the protagonist of the story is brought to trial at the end of the story, we find that his capital crime was reckless driving (the fiend!).
In the afterword to the original story, Niven pointed out that his story depicted one of the better outcomes. The worst the one were the government adds "criticism of the government" to the list of capital crimes.
The same loop seems to be occurring here. "Stop child pornography" became "stop virtual child pornography", and is now heading towards "stop offensive images."
The goal is laudable and one worth achieving, but the means... well, I see them heading towards adding "(by the way, criticism of the government or its policies counts as offensive)."
For starters, this is a suggestion by the Attorney General. This is not a bill that has been submitted to Congress, this is more like one of those "trial balloons" that gets floated.
Consider - this is an election year, and so both parties are going to offer ideas that sound reasonable and appeal to their primary consituencies (pun intended). Gonzales and other members of the Bush team are going to try to do something to help before November. It won't get past the Democrats, but that can be spun into "perverted Democrats who don't care about protecting our children."
The Democrats are going to do similar things, such as proposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies. It won't get past the Republicans, but that can be spun into "obstructionist Republicans who don't give a d**n about ordinary people."
I had to answer that question with a "yes/no" when I worked at Sam's Club (hey, the dot-bomb had dropped, and I had to make rent payments from somewhere), and I answered "no". The manager, though, asked me for a follow-up, and I explained that first, I would confront the thief and give him/her a chance to come clean to management. Following that, I would turn them in.
So, even at places like Sam's Club, they pay attention to their tests, but don't slavishly rely on them. I guess the manager also liked my answer - I basically said I cared about both the company and the people. It helped get me the job, so... <shrug>
This guy could be a stooge that is there to help tell everyone that their liberties are being protected by the video cameras being installed in their homes.
I remember reading somewhere that, in Imperial China, there was an interesting punishment meted out to misbehaving schoolgirls. They were to spend a night standing a post near the Emperor's bedroom, and relieve his insomnia by regularly shouting out, "The Empire is at peace! The Empire is at peace!"
It strikes me as unlikely that this was the Emperor's idea....
Slashdot Mirror
I got my first programming job when I was about 21, with a small company that didn't really want me to finish community college. 11 years later, I thought that maybe I was tired of programming, so I finally got my degree in mechanical engineering... just in time for a big slump in the engineering field.
However, since I had the magic piece of paper, I was able to get a temporary programming job at a manufacturing company that wanted someone familiar with 3-D geometry, and I still remembered enough of my calculus to satisfy them. So I was back in programming.
Looking back on it, my age and small-company experience helped - I had more work experience than Danny Newbie just out of college, and was willing to be paid the same (it was nearly half again what I had been making!). And after that, I was back to being a programmer - just a better-paid and better-treated one.
Since then, I've come to the conclusion that I probably would've made a competent engineer - but I'm a happier programmer.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can't figure out what it is."
And if you then return the car to the dealership afterward (translate: you uninstall the software), cool. I got no gripe with that (for what that's worth - I don't see my ethical dilemmas being a major factor in your decisions :) ).
Did you copy the entire journal? And did you pass those copies on to your friends so that they didn't have to pay for their own copy? Then, yes, the journal should come knocking on your door.
Justify it all you want, pretty it up as much as you can, what you are doing is basically taking what isn't yours, because you want it but don't want to pay for it. If you don't think that's theft, then we don't have a whole lot more to discuss.
Cool. You borrow the game, the way you'd borrow a microwave, or a car, or an arc welder.
Except your rationalization breaks down when you consider that when you "borrow" a game by putting it on your computer as well as on your friend's computer. At that point, you are creating a new microwave, or a new car or a new arc welder. (How else are you and your friend able to use it at the same time?)
It's like taking a book and photocopying the pages so that your friend doesn't have to go and buy his/her own copy, but it doesn't seem to cost you anything, so why not?
And then you wonder how come the good video game developers don't stay in the business?
Perhaps you're right. I've sometimes taken remarks like that and misunderstood them.
The problem with personal peeves is that sometimes one misreads the intent of another's statement, and I may have done that here. Thank you for gently raising that point.
So, the rationale for pirating games is "they're crummy anyway"?
Isn't that like stealing a car off a dealer's lot, and then saying "Why's everyone so upset? It was a lemon anyway...."?
I'm not meaning to moralize here. I mean, I can see the reasoning used - "I'm poor, I can't afford to buy it, someone's willing to share it, so why not?"
But to then rationalize it as "and it was crummy to begin with" is going too far. It was the reason given for some software I helped write getting pirated, and so it's admittedly a personal peeve.
Haldane's law:
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.
Sometimes it may sound like one voice, but it ain't.
I wish you weren't anonymous - I'd mark you "friend" for reminding me about that.
I'm not looking for unaninimity (sp?) of opinion here. I realize that if you put three random Slashdot posters here, you are likely to get six trolls - each one's opinion of the other two. It's when you have the same people espousing both ends that I get aggravated.
Amazing! A caucus for the rights of Congressional victims!
Where can the American people join up?
What bugs me about this is how some people spend time writing up bitingly barbed and highly satirical screeds about the monumental stupidity of common users. "Imagine this bozo trying to set up a home network like he was a real sysadmin," they sneer. "And the whole time he doesn't realize that the brand of router he's using has a vulnerability somewhere deep in the firmware. If I'd been him, I'd have spent more money and more time, but instead this poor sap gets to deal with what his ignorance has unleashed...." and so on, ad nauseam.
The reason it annoys me is because, when these people are caught piggybacking onto their next-door neighbor's wireless, they then post that "this whole debate is silly, anyway, because the airwaves are free to everybody, and it's unfair to expect someone not to take advantage of such an unexpected bounty, and anyway the neighbor wasn't using that much of it in the first place, and he had it coming for not securing his network...."
But then again, I guess that's different.
Someone once said that "fiction is lies told about others that tell the truth about ourselves." Anything with decent story-telling causes many to provide the "willing suspension of disbelief" needed for good stories that cause us to care about the characters.
Add the interactive aspect of games, and the situation is magnified. At one point, Homeworld gives the player an enemy race that the story later shows to have been an offshoot of the player's race that went collectively crazy. I myself found that to be an affecting image. (For that matter, I actually found myself saying "Break out the #10 can of whoop-ass!" out loud when I was having to rescue a neutral-but-friendly force from attack.)
So, I'd say that, regardless of the medium, it should not be a big suprise that something that involves so much of your attention also acquires some emotional capital as well.
Do they make any mention of the bi-annual creation of hot air known as the U.S. Federal Elections?
The parent post needs to be modded down. After all, this is a forum for serious discussion for important issues, rather than someplace for people to whine about other people's posts like this... wait a minute...
Me, I'd worry that they'd hand you a cashier's check for $2,000,000 and ask you to send the change back to their new corporate office in Lagos.
"People deserve the government they get and get the government they deserve."
And if the people of Louisiana are so convinced that video games are such a menace that they require laws like this, then by $DEITY they deserve their government!
There was an "Addams Family" episode - the old black-and-white TV series - where Uncle Fester, in his outrage at someone, grabs his gun and announces his solution: "I'll shoot him in the back!"
In this episode, Morticia responds, "Now, now, Uncle Fester, you'll do no such thing."
"In the side?" suggests Fester.
"No," Morticia answers firmly. "We shall settle this issue through legal channels."
Fester looks doubtful. "Shooting's safer," he points out.
Sometimes I agree with Fester.
You're probably right, that on legal and moral grounds, the concepts don't hold up. The problem is that, with as litigious as our society has become, neither legality nor morality seem to hold. It frequently turns out to be cheaper for the makers of WidgetWorx to settle than to fight the good fight.
The problem with vendor honesty is that it backfires on the vendor.
Let us suppose that WidgetWorx version 1.1 gets shipped. Inside the package is a list that says, "at the time of shipment, these are known bugs/shortcomings/issues."
An ambulance service that uses WidgetWorx for their dispatching service, and something goes wrong that leads to a patient dying. Said patient's estate could hire a savvy lawyer who would make a wrongful death claim against the ambulance service for "using a software package with known defects, thus indicating negligence." Even if the package did not have anything to do with the patient's death, it would be an indication of careless behavior and "lack of due diligence" by the ambulance service.
The ambulance service (or its insurance company), in turn, would sue the manufacturers of WidgetWorx to recoup their losses... and the list of issues would make it a slam-dunk.
I'm not denying that "vendor honesty" as you describe it would be a good thing in a perfect world. Unfortunately, this world, like my grammar, ain't perfect.
... what happens if you don't exactly feel like yourself one day?
(The scary thing is that this joke might actually turn out to be a valid point!)
With Apple, monitor watches you!
<Cue chirping crickets>
When Larry Niven first wrote "The Jigsaw Man" in the 1960's, he showed the idea of a loop driven entirely by positive feedback.
His story chronicled in sidebars the idea of the organ banks as a means to use execution to benefit society. "If the odds broke right, a convicted axe murderer could end up saving more lives than he took." The problem was that (1) there was a limited number of people eligible to put into the organ banks, and (2) an increasing number of people needing organs from the organ banks. As an organ bank would be like any other bank -- they can only put out what comes into them -- they needed additional means to fill them. Thus, the government (supported by the law-abiding voters who could never see themselves being in this position) proceeded to add criminal offenses whose punishment would help replenish the organ banks. Attempted murder, armed criminal action, burglary, and so on, were added to the list of offenses. Finally, when the protagonist of the story is brought to trial at the end of the story, we find that his capital crime was reckless driving (the fiend!).
In the afterword to the original story, Niven pointed out that his story depicted one of the better outcomes. The worst the one were the government adds "criticism of the government" to the list of capital crimes.
The same loop seems to be occurring here. "Stop child pornography" became "stop virtual child pornography", and is now heading towards "stop offensive images."
The goal is laudable and one worth achieving, but the means... well, I see them heading towards adding "(by the way, criticism of the government or its policies counts as offensive)."
For starters, this is a suggestion by the Attorney General. This is not a bill that has been submitted to Congress, this is more like one of those "trial balloons" that gets floated.
Consider - this is an election year, and so both parties are going to offer ideas that sound reasonable and appeal to their primary consituencies (pun intended). Gonzales and other members of the Bush team are going to try to do something to help before November. It won't get past the Democrats, but that can be spun into "perverted Democrats who don't care about protecting our children."
The Democrats are going to do similar things, such as proposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies. It won't get past the Republicans, but that can be spun into "obstructionist Republicans who don't give a d**n about ordinary people."
It's a fun game, and any number can play....
I had to answer that question with a "yes/no" when I worked at Sam's Club (hey, the dot-bomb had dropped, and I had to make rent payments from somewhere), and I answered "no". The manager, though, asked me for a follow-up, and I explained that first, I would confront the thief and give him/her a chance to come clean to management. Following that, I would turn them in.
So, even at places like Sam's Club, they pay attention to their tests, but don't slavishly rely on them. I guess the manager also liked my answer - I basically said I cared about both the company and the people. It helped get me the job, so... <shrug>
I remember reading somewhere that, in Imperial China, there was an interesting punishment meted out to misbehaving schoolgirls. They were to spend a night standing a post near the Emperor's bedroom, and relieve his insomnia by regularly shouting out, "The Empire is at peace! The Empire is at peace!"
It strikes me as unlikely that this was the Emperor's idea....
I bow in the dust. I was flailing about for an example of a technology that had fallen out of popular favor, and I chose poorly. I apologize.