The problem is bad-faith contracts. The supposed solution is to set an arbitrary threshold at which people are smart enough to avoid them, though that clearly doesn't actually happen. Am I the only one who sees something fundamentally wrong there?
Here's a better idea: Solve the problem. Lower the burden of proof for invalidating a bad-faith contract, which currently requires a veritable mountain of evidence and a small army of lawyers to fight. Establish child-protection laws that are based on actual harm to the child, rather than prohibiting the child from doing things that will be routine later in life.
To use your example of dating teenagers, what's inherently wrong with that? Let's wait a moment for the knee-jerk "think of the children" reactions to settle... Okay, now what's really wrong with teenagers dating whomever they want? The biggest risk is of course pregnancy and STDs, followed closely by emotional trauma. For a normal crime like murder, there must be a clear chain of events to establish criminal intent - You pull the trigger of the gun, knowing that the bullet will likely cause enough trauma to kill. For dating a minor, it makes little difference whether you intend to fornicate with the minor or not, or whether there is ever any intent to harm anyone. Often as far as the law is concerned, anything that the parents don't like is statutory rape. Of course, there are the more remote risks like abduction and other heinous crimes, but those are already crimes. Why tack on an extra crime to a trial, other than just to have something of which to convict the accused?
Back to the subject at hand, why must all contracts with minors be forbidden? Mr. Kugler is probably facing a NDA in exchange for a cash payoff. If there's something in the contract that can't be understood by a mere 17-year-old, perhaps the advice of a lawyer is all that should be necessary for Mr. Kugler to be well-informed and sufficiently able to avoid bad-faith contracts. The whole issue of corporate personhood centers around whether corporations can be legal entities that can enter into contracts. By excluding minors from having enforceable contracts, they clearly aren't considered people.
Welcome, Mr. Kugler, to the good ol' US-of-A, where you aren't a real person until you can cast a ballot. If you get a job, you must follow a different set of rules. If you break a law, you get a different justice system. If you win a contest, you have a different set of rules that forbid you from winning anything. That's right, in several states you can't actually own property until you're 18. I'm not sure what jurisdiction PayPal/eBay is playing ball in, but in general, don't expect the government to ever side with anyone who hasn't reached that magical moment where they are instantly freed from their childhood stupidity.
You see, despite biology saying that humans are mature at around 15 years, the Puritans who founded the United States were rather squeamish about things like youthful ambition, political activism, and worst of all, sex. The generally-accepted age of maturity moved back several years, finally settling at 18, and it's been stuck there. Of course, anyone under 18 who wants to have their full rights doesn't have the right to get them (except through a red-tape-filled emancipation process), and no parents ever want their darling little children to grow up so fast, and no politician would dare propose an affront to "traditional family values", so there are no realistic attempts to get more legal power for minors.
A few states allow certain adult rights to 16- and 17-year-olds, but those rights are usually restricted to things like "can work on a farm" and "can be prosecuted as an adult for heinous crimes". Practically all other rights are the domain of the parents, so there's a slim chance that your parents could ask for the reward as promised, but that's unlikely to work, because they didn't find the bug.
Welcome, sir, to America, where our child abuse is civilized!
I predict the Pauls will use this for political gain. All it takes is a bit of spin:
Clearly the "official" establishment is failing to support the little guy who just wants to use his own name. Because they obviously aren't catering to the desires of a particularly-vocal individual, they must of course just be a tool for oppression by the Big Government. After all, what good are these "rules" and "procedures" when they hinder the industrious and innovative people building their own future, and instead help the lazy people just using others' names?
The drug cartels have submarines, railroad tunnels, aircraft, and an army of expendable humans to move drugs. Why would they bother with a little drone with a small payload and a range of only 3 miles?
We should worry more about other bad guys, like oppressive governments, whose goals are less "move stuff somewhere" and more "control people everywhere".
Please read the comment I replied to. The point is that "this is McDonalds" doesn't count as an excuse for putting unsuspecting customers at risk, and that's something lawyers should be doing.
Similarly, the comment about the insane medical system is also in response to the earlier post. The Affordable Care Act is at attempt to defend medical professionals from the billions of dollars in unpaid bills annually. Yes, I agree that a single-payer system would be far simpler and much more effective, but there's no way the Congress would approve such a thing, because it looks too much like socialism.
There is that argument as well, but it's even more difficult to determine what's "fair". Driving an hour to that minimum-wage job downtown puts more wear on the roads than the CEO who can afford to live closer... should we tax people more for not being able to afford to move? That lower-cost housing likely also has a higher crime rate, so should we tax more for the burden on police services?
On the other hand, the company's fortune is due to its employees being safe and able to get to work, so perhaps the company (and its highest-profiting officers) should pay more to ensure that the employees are taken care of.
The case of Stella Liebeck is a perfect example of what lawyers should be doing. McDonalds, for over a decade, served their coffee at temperatures hot enough to instantly cause severe burns - over 700 of them that led to lawsuits, almost all of which were settled out of court with no indication of McDonalds lowering their coffee temperature or even training employees to ensure lids were put on properly before serving. Stella Liebeck's lawyer was the first one to successfully bring McDonalds to court for effectively throwing scalding coffee at customers, and that only happened after McDonalds refused to settle for paying for Stella's two years of rehabilitation and skin grafts.
This is what's worth defending. When somebody, be it a big company or an individual, unfairly puts others at risk, those others should be defended. McDonald's customers should be defended from having hazardous material hastily handed to them, and people should be defended from the financial burden of being hit by a careless driver, and medical professionals should be defended from being duty-bound to treat everyone, even if there's no reimbursement for the expense.
Reducing the sentiment to its basic form, humans should stay the *BLEEP* out of the physical world... Yeah, that's going well.
There are few laws that say "you can't research this technology". Rather, there are laws that describe what's acceptable to do with a particular technology once you have it. To use the Slashdot-standard car analogy, laws rarely forbid the use of cars, but using them in such a way as to put others' lives at risk is a crime. The ultimate goal of law is to help society to live peacefully by describing standards for behavior. Therefore laws only have authority over the human aspects of any field. All those legends and stories about legislators making laws redefining constants or banning certain phenomena are missing significant context that explain the lawyers' actions well, but reasonable legislation doesn't make a good story.
Then again, I suspect what you really mean to say is "Law should stay the *BLEEP* out of any affair I'm involved in, unless it benefits me more than anybody else".
If the government really gave a shit about "fair share" for taxes, then they'd charge a flat rate percentage for everyone.
A flat rate does not imply a fair share. Expenses aren't a flat rate, so someone earning minimum wage and barely making ends meet suffers more hardship under a flat rate than someone making millions and putting most of their income into long-term investments.
Law is a curious mixture of logic, psychology, history, ethics, and economics. It is not dominated by any one of those areas, but rather its complexity comes from the myriad interactions between different aspects of a particular situation. There is a certain nerdy beauty in those interactions and, for instance, it can indeed be quite interesting to see logical arguments suggesting discarding centuries of history in response to a recent socioeconomic change. Then with all the fervor of a sporting match and the careful maneuvering of a chess game, the opposing lawyer presents his logical arguments for how the past centuries' traditions should be upheld because the people now widely believe them to be ethically right, regardless of some particular moral standpoint.
Almost equally interesting is watching the other nerds arguing about which team is better. It's like a sports-bar brawl, but with bigger words.
If someone else were doing this, wouldn't India be the obvious choice for your final leg?
It would be the obvious choice, but it'd be the wrong one. It would be questioned, as you have, possibly spurring a deeper investigation that reveals India was a scapegoat. If I were doing it, my final leg would be somewhere like China, who would be most likely to assist in an investigation, that reveals my next-to-last leg in the United States, starting an international political mess. Only when the madness of diplomacy settles down will they work back to the drone in India, which by that time has been thoroughly damaged so as to hide any evidence of the attack. Pakistan blames India, while China and the US are both annoyed at having to roll out their diplomatic weaponry.
Ah, I remember Geocities. I actually was quite involved in the community there, and the biggest problem was that they did update the property. Where a vibrant community had grown up around a "neighborhood" metaphor, Yahoo replaced it with a top-down dictatorship. There were no more Community Leaders, no neighbors, and no humanity that made Geocities a friendly place to be. Members were no longer people, but rather just usernames, eventually reduced down to an email address.
This was, of course, about a decade before "social media" became a buzzword. Yahoo had a community, and could have turned it into something bigger and better. Instead, they turned it into meat for advertisements.
It's time for Sarten-X's semi-weekly anti-media rant.
The reason the news stories you read about are always us-vs.-them is because you're reading news stories. It's not what's really going on. In a newspaper, the story about the big technology company donating millions of dolalrs in products and support to a third-world country takes a nice little corner on page 12. Meanwhile, the front-page big headline is a story about the company that sues another company for just as much.
People love controversy, and the media is happy to supply it. It doesn't matter how good your company is or what your corporate charter's stated mission is, you're still portrayed as a Big Evil Company that's out to greedily gather money and decimate your adversaries. On the off chance that you keep your dealings clean enough to not get sued (and don't sue others), you can bet that the media will invent an adversary for you, combining the markets of your closest competitors into a shady conspiracy, just for the sake of a story.
Sorry, Larry Page: News-media viciousness is here to stay.
Historically, Sun always used the Sun JDK as the RI and made it available under the Binary Code License (BCL). This was very convenient for Sun since it meant that its product implementation was compatible by definition. However, it was also confusing since the Sun JDK contained quite a few features that were not part of the standard, such as the Java Plugin.
And these people would then be liable for whatever legal recourse there is for online stalking/harassment, and deleting the video probably wouldn't curb that much anyway.
Yes, let's require the victim to file a few thousand individual lawsuits against anonymous defendants who posted offensive YouTube comments... then we can also disparage him for engaging in a mass lawsuit campaign like the RIAA.
Or we can just remove the biggest offenders in continuing the libel. Get rid of YouTube, Facebook, and Google listings connecting his name to the video, and the most reputable sites left in search results will be the news articles explaining that he's innocent. Potential employers won't be nearly as discouraged from hiring him, and he doesn't have to worry nearly as much about being the punching bag of the Internet. There will still be libelous statements out there, but the damage won't be as substantial. It's not perfect, but it's as close to justice as we can get.
I just don't think there's a feasible way, nor should there be, to prevent all future potential harassment. The GIFT is an unfortunate but necessary by-product of a free internet.
Further analysis of the theory by the author suggests a feasible mechanism for curbing such abuse. All we need to do is add consequences. Unfortunately, requiring the victim to file separate lawsuits for each libelous commenter is unjust in itself. Google could simply release the personal profiles of such posters, but that runs afoul of people's sense of privacy. This raises an interesting dilemma: Why should Mr. McKeough lose his privacy for having done nothing wrong, but we protect the privacy of stalkers?
The GIFT is not a by-product of a free Internet. Indeed, examples of similar behavior have been noted back to ancient Greece. What's apparent is that when people have no concern for consequences, they are abusive, but the consequences don't need to be as severe as legal punishment. We can still have an Internet full of free expression, but with restrained offense. Consider this conversation, for instance. You and I have diametrically opposed viewpoints, yet can still respectfully express our arguments. The only consequence for us launching into a tirade of profanity-filled ad-hominem attacks is that we lose respect among our peers, but that's enough.
Perhaps a better solution to this problem is for Google, et al. to replace the video with a nice montage illustrating the harm that's come from Internet vigilantism. Show the financial damage of a DDoS, show the death threats, and show the victims of harassment who committed suicide. Let's add some consequences.
Since the defendants in the suit (the big companies hosting the video and comments) are operating in his court's jurisdiction, he has the legal right to order them to remove the lies and obviously-false information linking McKeogh to the crime he didn't commit. Since those lies and false accusations are causing unjust harm to McKeogh, the judge has the moral right to order them removed, as well.
How well would that work, though? By now, the comments on the videos apparently have McKeogh's home address, phone number, and other personal details. A small note of sanity won't stop the self-righteous asshats of the Internet from making this man's life hell. Even through this discussion, there's already many commentors promising to perpetuate the man's suffering, just out of spite for being told that not to libel others.
The problem is the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Someone's personal life has been severely harmed by the information these companies continue to publish. When they're asked to stop publishing such lies, the schmucks crawl out to protest this affront to their ability to screw up others' lives, and they promise to just screw up the man's life even worse than before.
This is not civilization. This is unbridled sadism masquerading as vigilantism.
Sure, the obvious spin the summary evokes is that the judge is one of those numbskull government bureaucrats, who thinks the Internet has a central authority that can respond to such requests. Let's all laugh at the silly judge and reinforce our anti-government hivemind.
On the other hand, the judge likely ordered that the video be taken down, knowing perfectly well that it's impossible to be removed completely. However, those big companies make up the majority of the video's audience, so if they take down the video (and its associated accusation of Mr. McKeogh), the effect is to substantially reduce the harm to Mr. McKeogh's reputation... which is exactly the goal. Since the ruling is in Ireland, where those companies keep their double-Irish tax avoidance entities, the companies will of course want to stay in the good grace of the Irish courts.
What's interesting is the pedantic point that right or wrong, OpenJDK's right. Sure, it's horribly broken, but by being the reference implementation, it's right by definition. This is indeed similar to Microsoft's mistreatment of the Office Open XML format. Upon release, the official spec was demonstrably not the format Office actually used. For making a program compatible with Microsoft Office, Microsoft's spec was nearly useless. For making a JRE compatible with Oracle's Java, Oracle's spec is nearly useless. In both cases, it's an anticompetitive maneuver to force the open-source competitors to do more work, not only implementing the spec faithfully for the correctly-written programs, but also reverse-engineering the closed-source offerings to figure out the expected incorrect behavior.
Hairyfeet called for an open-source Java implementation:
...we need an open source replacement, something that will just patch the bugs instead of screwing everything up by replacing. Hell maybe somebody could port the Google version android uses but make it compatible with standard Java apps...
My point is that there already is an open-source replacement. It's plagued with constant FUD from the ever-present threat of Oracle's legal team, so it's not nearly as popular as it should be for a reference implementation. In a vicious cycle, that means the bugs and not-as-expected parts (the aforementioned incompatibilities, but again that's the wrong term for a pedant like me) don't get enough attention to be fixed.
Android's Dalvik VM is not a feasible solution. It's even more wildly different than OpenJDK. While the Java specification declares that Java VMs are stack-based machines, Dalvik is register-based. Some classes can be converted automatically, but the majority of existing Java code will require extensive manual conversion, and that means fully retesting every part of everything.
In my opinion, the right solution is to forcibly free Java from the tyranny of Oracle's stewardship, and put it in the hands of a benevolent company or foundation that can be expected to care most about having a stable and secure platform rather than making a big profit. From there, the OpenJDK project can get programming assistance with legal indemnity while focusing on cross-platform perfection, and the official JVM can continue to support the full integration features that OpenJDK lacks (because they're not finalized enough to be in the spec).
Maybe that benevolent company, the source of all Java's warm fuzzy goodness, could even be named after the benevolent energy source that powers this planet...
Humans aren't evolved for philanthropy. Our brains care most about our own situation. When we hear "Millions of people suffer from this condition", we shrug and move on. It's just vocal cords, or it's just a stroke, or it's just depression. Once a particular condition affects us personally, we become fully aware of just how bad it really is. That's when we realize how much we take our voices for granted, or how difficult our life is without even a small part of our cognition, or how crushing sadness can affect our daily lives. That's when our brain now only allows us to donate time or money, but compels us to do something in the hope of getting relief. This is why so many nonprofits have awareness campaigns. The average person is utterly unaware of how bad life can be, because our brains aren't built for empathy.
It's not the programmers that matter. Programmers can write Java and compile it with any JDK they please, and it should run on any JRE, including OpenJDK and its companion JRE project. I don't know how well they patch compared to Oracle, but it's an open-source replacement, which works pretty well in my experience.
Yes, I did write that. And yes, the stigma is still pervasive in areas dominated by the old ideology, including law, medicine (sadly), religion, and news media. Fortunately, mental health awareness is indeed spreading through the public. Help agencies are advertising suicide hotlines and informal discussion groups, and hanging up posters saying that "mental illness is an illness", highlighting how it's a condition affecting an otherwise-normal person. Then there are the many more popular artistic works like next to normal that are ever-so-slowly highlighting the fact that mental illness is a daily part of millions of lives, and only very few ever reach the point of seriously considering harming others.
It took a century after the Civil War for America to recognize that African Americans are regular people, and there's still some holdouts. We're only about 20 years into this fight.
It's a pretty crappy headline. My apologies for the length and tangential nature of this post. This is a very personal subject for me.
The problem is that we really don't have a decent understanding of the brain (or its abnormalities) at all. We have collections of symptoms appearing in varying severities with varying results, and we have treatments that alter those symptoms. As far as medicine goes, that's really about it.
The problem with a diagnosis is that it's a label. Someone who says "I'm bipolar" can expect that every action will be judged harshly as to whether it's actually their intended "normal" action, or the manifestation of their depression or mania, whichever happens to be the case that day (or hour). A child who's inattentive in school may just be bored, but the diagnosis of ADD opens the door to differently-structured classes that may help - as well as opening the door to ridicule for being different. Sometimes, yes, it's better to stay undiagnosed, and sometimes it's better to get the diagnosis and do nothing with it.
On the other hand, diagnosis is necessary for any treatment. Someone can understand "I'm sad all the time, and don't like it", but without the term "depression", it's very difficult to find information about how to improve. I've met several people who, in the 90's when depression was highly stigmatized, had traumatic experiences that they couldn't talk about and couldn't do anything to recover from, partly because they wouldn't consider the possibility of actually being "depressed".
To make matters worse, there are still an enormous number of people who simply deny the existence of any mental illness. They assume that kids with ADHD are just being active children, or people with depression are just sad, or people with bipolar disorder are just moody. The illness isn't what's visible from the outside, though. The illness is what's happening in the brain to cause the outward symptoms. The ADHD child can't calm down and focus - his mind always jumps to doing something else. The depressed people can't cheer up - even happy times are often plagued by a sadness that's always present in their minds. The bipolar person can't control their mood - the emotions are overwhelming.
What's happening now, albeit slowly, is that the stigma is being countered by awareness programs. This story is in a similar vein to the one a few days ago decrying DSM-5 for not being valid regarding mental health. As our understanding and openness about mental illness improves, we're starting to recognize that typical Western medicine may have done some serious harm to our society. A recent Broadway musical explored this question well.
In next to normal, a woman who grieved four months for a dead child was diagnosed as "depressed", and began 16 years of treatment. One of the questions explored is whether her illness was really because of the loss, or whether it was because of the trauma of ongoing treatment. There is no answer. There is no happy ending. There's only the promise of a next-to-normal life, where everything is perfect except for when it isn't, and there's always some new treatment to try.
That's the ongoing problem with our current handling of mental illness. We have collections of symptoms, and drugs that treat them, but we don't really understand how. The DSM-5 is so vague and imprecise that a particular symptom is painted with a wide brush to be a whole set of disorders. With no testing for suitability, medications are tried that aren't fully understood, in the hope that it's the right drug to set everything right quickly. When it doesn't work, another regimen is proposed, also with little or no testing for suitability. As the patient's treatment drags on, whole classes of drugs are ruled out for their side effects, then brought back be
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The problem is bad-faith contracts. The supposed solution is to set an arbitrary threshold at which people are smart enough to avoid them, though that clearly doesn't actually happen. Am I the only one who sees something fundamentally wrong there?
Here's a better idea: Solve the problem. Lower the burden of proof for invalidating a bad-faith contract, which currently requires a veritable mountain of evidence and a small army of lawyers to fight. Establish child-protection laws that are based on actual harm to the child, rather than prohibiting the child from doing things that will be routine later in life.
To use your example of dating teenagers, what's inherently wrong with that? Let's wait a moment for the knee-jerk "think of the children" reactions to settle... Okay, now what's really wrong with teenagers dating whomever they want? The biggest risk is of course pregnancy and STDs, followed closely by emotional trauma. For a normal crime like murder, there must be a clear chain of events to establish criminal intent - You pull the trigger of the gun, knowing that the bullet will likely cause enough trauma to kill. For dating a minor, it makes little difference whether you intend to fornicate with the minor or not, or whether there is ever any intent to harm anyone. Often as far as the law is concerned, anything that the parents don't like is statutory rape. Of course, there are the more remote risks like abduction and other heinous crimes, but those are already crimes. Why tack on an extra crime to a trial, other than just to have something of which to convict the accused?
Back to the subject at hand, why must all contracts with minors be forbidden? Mr. Kugler is probably facing a NDA in exchange for a cash payoff. If there's something in the contract that can't be understood by a mere 17-year-old, perhaps the advice of a lawyer is all that should be necessary for Mr. Kugler to be well-informed and sufficiently able to avoid bad-faith contracts. The whole issue of corporate personhood centers around whether corporations can be legal entities that can enter into contracts. By excluding minors from having enforceable contracts, they clearly aren't considered people.
Welcome, Mr. Kugler, to the good ol' US-of-A, where you aren't a real person until you can cast a ballot. If you get a job, you must follow a different set of rules. If you break a law, you get a different justice system. If you win a contest, you have a different set of rules that forbid you from winning anything. That's right, in several states you can't actually own property until you're 18. I'm not sure what jurisdiction PayPal/eBay is playing ball in, but in general, don't expect the government to ever side with anyone who hasn't reached that magical moment where they are instantly freed from their childhood stupidity.
You see, despite biology saying that humans are mature at around 15 years, the Puritans who founded the United States were rather squeamish about things like youthful ambition, political activism, and worst of all, sex. The generally-accepted age of maturity moved back several years, finally settling at 18, and it's been stuck there. Of course, anyone under 18 who wants to have their full rights doesn't have the right to get them (except through a red-tape-filled emancipation process), and no parents ever want their darling little children to grow up so fast, and no politician would dare propose an affront to "traditional family values", so there are no realistic attempts to get more legal power for minors.
A few states allow certain adult rights to 16- and 17-year-olds, but those rights are usually restricted to things like "can work on a farm" and "can be prosecuted as an adult for heinous crimes". Practically all other rights are the domain of the parents, so there's a slim chance that your parents could ask for the reward as promised, but that's unlikely to work, because they didn't find the bug.
Welcome, sir, to America, where our child abuse is civilized!
I predict the Pauls will use this for political gain. All it takes is a bit of spin:
Clearly the "official" establishment is failing to support the little guy who just wants to use his own name. Because they obviously aren't catering to the desires of a particularly-vocal individual, they must of course just be a tool for oppression by the Big Government. After all, what good are these "rules" and "procedures" when they hinder the industrious and innovative people building their own future, and instead help the lazy people just using others' names?
The drug cartels have submarines, railroad tunnels, aircraft, and an army of expendable humans to move drugs. Why would they bother with a little drone with a small payload and a range of only 3 miles?
We should worry more about other bad guys, like oppressive governments, whose goals are less "move stuff somewhere" and more "control people everywhere".
Please read the comment I replied to. The point is that "this is McDonalds" doesn't count as an excuse for putting unsuspecting customers at risk, and that's something lawyers should be doing.
Similarly, the comment about the insane medical system is also in response to the earlier post. The Affordable Care Act is at attempt to defend medical professionals from the billions of dollars in unpaid bills annually. Yes, I agree that a single-payer system would be far simpler and much more effective, but there's no way the Congress would approve such a thing, because it looks too much like socialism.
There is that argument as well, but it's even more difficult to determine what's "fair". Driving an hour to that minimum-wage job downtown puts more wear on the roads than the CEO who can afford to live closer... should we tax people more for not being able to afford to move? That lower-cost housing likely also has a higher crime rate, so should we tax more for the burden on police services?
On the other hand, the company's fortune is due to its employees being safe and able to get to work, so perhaps the company (and its highest-profiting officers) should pay more to ensure that the employees are taken care of.
I'll use your own example: hot coffee.
The case of Stella Liebeck is a perfect example of what lawyers should be doing. McDonalds, for over a decade, served their coffee at temperatures hot enough to instantly cause severe burns - over 700 of them that led to lawsuits, almost all of which were settled out of court with no indication of McDonalds lowering their coffee temperature or even training employees to ensure lids were put on properly before serving. Stella Liebeck's lawyer was the first one to successfully bring McDonalds to court for effectively throwing scalding coffee at customers, and that only happened after McDonalds refused to settle for paying for Stella's two years of rehabilitation and skin grafts.
This is what's worth defending. When somebody, be it a big company or an individual, unfairly puts others at risk, those others should be defended. McDonald's customers should be defended from having hazardous material hastily handed to them, and people should be defended from the financial burden of being hit by a careless driver, and medical professionals should be defended from being duty-bound to treat everyone, even if there's no reimbursement for the expense.
Reducing the sentiment to its basic form, humans should stay the *BLEEP* out of the physical world... Yeah, that's going well.
There are few laws that say "you can't research this technology". Rather, there are laws that describe what's acceptable to do with a particular technology once you have it. To use the Slashdot-standard car analogy, laws rarely forbid the use of cars, but using them in such a way as to put others' lives at risk is a crime. The ultimate goal of law is to help society to live peacefully by describing standards for behavior. Therefore laws only have authority over the human aspects of any field. All those legends and stories about legislators making laws redefining constants or banning certain phenomena are missing significant context that explain the lawyers' actions well, but reasonable legislation doesn't make a good story.
Then again, I suspect what you really mean to say is "Law should stay the *BLEEP* out of any affair I'm involved in, unless it benefits me more than anybody else".
If the government really gave a shit about "fair share" for taxes, then they'd charge a flat rate percentage for everyone.
A flat rate does not imply a fair share. Expenses aren't a flat rate, so someone earning minimum wage and barely making ends meet suffers more hardship under a flat rate than someone making millions and putting most of their income into long-term investments.
Law is a curious mixture of logic, psychology, history, ethics, and economics. It is not dominated by any one of those areas, but rather its complexity comes from the myriad interactions between different aspects of a particular situation. There is a certain nerdy beauty in those interactions and, for instance, it can indeed be quite interesting to see logical arguments suggesting discarding centuries of history in response to a recent socioeconomic change. Then with all the fervor of a sporting match and the careful maneuvering of a chess game, the opposing lawyer presents his logical arguments for how the past centuries' traditions should be upheld because the people now widely believe them to be ethically right, regardless of some particular moral standpoint.
Almost equally interesting is watching the other nerds arguing about which team is better. It's like a sports-bar brawl, but with bigger words.
If someone else were doing this, wouldn't India be the obvious choice for your final leg?
It would be the obvious choice, but it'd be the wrong one. It would be questioned, as you have, possibly spurring a deeper investigation that reveals India was a scapegoat. If I were doing it, my final leg would be somewhere like China, who would be most likely to assist in an investigation, that reveals my next-to-last leg in the United States, starting an international political mess. Only when the madness of diplomacy settles down will they work back to the drone in India, which by that time has been thoroughly damaged so as to hide any evidence of the attack. Pakistan blames India, while China and the US are both annoyed at having to roll out their diplomatic weaponry.
Ah, I remember Geocities. I actually was quite involved in the community there, and the biggest problem was that they did update the property. Where a vibrant community had grown up around a "neighborhood" metaphor, Yahoo replaced it with a top-down dictatorship. There were no more Community Leaders, no neighbors, and no humanity that made Geocities a friendly place to be. Members were no longer people, but rather just usernames, eventually reduced down to an email address.
This was, of course, about a decade before "social media" became a buzzword. Yahoo had a community, and could have turned it into something bigger and better. Instead, they turned it into meat for advertisements.
And what would the media be without shills adding to the mud-slinging and muckraking?
Tolerable.
It's time for Sarten-X's semi-weekly anti-media rant.
The reason the news stories you read about are always us-vs.-them is because you're reading news stories. It's not what's really going on. In a newspaper, the story about the big technology company donating millions of dolalrs in products and support to a third-world country takes a nice little corner on page 12. Meanwhile, the front-page big headline is a story about the company that sues another company for just as much.
People love controversy, and the media is happy to supply it. It doesn't matter how good your company is or what your corporate charter's stated mission is, you're still portrayed as a Big Evil Company that's out to greedily gather money and decimate your adversaries. On the off chance that you keep your dealings clean enough to not get sued (and don't sue others), you can bet that the media will invent an adversary for you, combining the markets of your closest competitors into a shady conspiracy, just for the sake of a story.
Sorry, Larry Page: News-media viciousness is here to stay.
Keep digging that hole deeper.
Historically, Sun always used the Sun JDK as the RI and made it available under the Binary Code License (BCL). This was very convenient for Sun since it meant that its product implementation was compatible by definition. However, it was also confusing since the Sun JDK contained quite a few features that were not part of the standard, such as the Java Plugin.
And these people would then be liable for whatever legal recourse there is for online stalking/harassment, and deleting the video probably wouldn't curb that much anyway.
Yes, let's require the victim to file a few thousand individual lawsuits against anonymous defendants who posted offensive YouTube comments... then we can also disparage him for engaging in a mass lawsuit campaign like the RIAA.
Or we can just remove the biggest offenders in continuing the libel. Get rid of YouTube, Facebook, and Google listings connecting his name to the video, and the most reputable sites left in search results will be the news articles explaining that he's innocent. Potential employers won't be nearly as discouraged from hiring him, and he doesn't have to worry nearly as much about being the punching bag of the Internet. There will still be libelous statements out there, but the damage won't be as substantial. It's not perfect, but it's as close to justice as we can get.
I just don't think there's a feasible way, nor should there be, to prevent all future potential harassment. The GIFT is an unfortunate but necessary by-product of a free internet.
Further analysis of the theory by the author suggests a feasible mechanism for curbing such abuse. All we need to do is add consequences. Unfortunately, requiring the victim to file separate lawsuits for each libelous commenter is unjust in itself. Google could simply release the personal profiles of such posters, but that runs afoul of people's sense of privacy. This raises an interesting dilemma: Why should Mr. McKeough lose his privacy for having done nothing wrong, but we protect the privacy of stalkers?
The GIFT is not a by-product of a free Internet. Indeed, examples of similar behavior have been noted back to ancient Greece. What's apparent is that when people have no concern for consequences, they are abusive, but the consequences don't need to be as severe as legal punishment. We can still have an Internet full of free expression, but with restrained offense. Consider this conversation, for instance. You and I have diametrically opposed viewpoints, yet can still respectfully express our arguments. The only consequence for us launching into a tirade of profanity-filled ad-hominem attacks is that we lose respect among our peers, but that's enough.
Perhaps a better solution to this problem is for Google, et al. to replace the video with a nice montage illustrating the harm that's come from Internet vigilantism. Show the financial damage of a DDoS, show the death threats, and show the victims of harassment who committed suicide. Let's add some consequences.
Since the defendants in the suit (the big companies hosting the video and comments) are operating in his court's jurisdiction, he has the legal right to order them to remove the lies and obviously-false information linking McKeogh to the crime he didn't commit. Since those lies and false accusations are causing unjust harm to McKeogh, the judge has the moral right to order them removed, as well.
How well would that work, though? By now, the comments on the videos apparently have McKeogh's home address, phone number, and other personal details. A small note of sanity won't stop the self-righteous asshats of the Internet from making this man's life hell. Even through this discussion, there's already many commentors promising to perpetuate the man's suffering, just out of spite for being told that not to libel others.
The problem is the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Someone's personal life has been severely harmed by the information these companies continue to publish. When they're asked to stop publishing such lies, the schmucks crawl out to protest this affront to their ability to screw up others' lives, and they promise to just screw up the man's life even worse than before.
This is not civilization. This is unbridled sadism masquerading as vigilantism.
Sure, the obvious spin the summary evokes is that the judge is one of those numbskull government bureaucrats, who thinks the Internet has a central authority that can respond to such requests. Let's all laugh at the silly judge and reinforce our anti-government hivemind.
On the other hand, the judge likely ordered that the video be taken down, knowing perfectly well that it's impossible to be removed completely. However, those big companies make up the majority of the video's audience, so if they take down the video (and its associated accusation of Mr. McKeogh), the effect is to substantially reduce the harm to Mr. McKeogh's reputation... which is exactly the goal. Since the ruling is in Ireland, where those companies keep their double-Irish tax avoidance entities, the companies will of course want to stay in the good grace of the Irish courts.
What's interesting is the pedantic point that right or wrong, OpenJDK's right. Sure, it's horribly broken, but by being the reference implementation, it's right by definition. This is indeed similar to Microsoft's mistreatment of the Office Open XML format. Upon release, the official spec was demonstrably not the format Office actually used. For making a program compatible with Microsoft Office, Microsoft's spec was nearly useless. For making a JRE compatible with Oracle's Java, Oracle's spec is nearly useless. In both cases, it's an anticompetitive maneuver to force the open-source competitors to do more work, not only implementing the spec faithfully for the correctly-written programs, but also reverse-engineering the closed-source offerings to figure out the expected incorrect behavior.
Hairyfeet called for an open-source Java implementation:
...we need an open source replacement, something that will just patch the bugs instead of screwing everything up by replacing. Hell maybe somebody could port the Google version android uses but make it compatible with standard Java apps...
My point is that there already is an open-source replacement. It's plagued with constant FUD from the ever-present threat of Oracle's legal team, so it's not nearly as popular as it should be for a reference implementation. In a vicious cycle, that means the bugs and not-as-expected parts (the aforementioned incompatibilities, but again that's the wrong term for a pedant like me) don't get enough attention to be fixed.
Android's Dalvik VM is not a feasible solution. It's even more wildly different than OpenJDK. While the Java specification declares that Java VMs are stack-based machines, Dalvik is register-based. Some classes can be converted automatically, but the majority of existing Java code will require extensive manual conversion, and that means fully retesting every part of everything.
In my opinion, the right solution is to forcibly free Java from the tyranny of Oracle's stewardship, and put it in the hands of a benevolent company or foundation that can be expected to care most about having a stable and secure platform rather than making a big profit. From there, the OpenJDK project can get programming assistance with legal indemnity while focusing on cross-platform perfection, and the official JVM can continue to support the full integration features that OpenJDK lacks (because they're not finalized enough to be in the spec).
Maybe that benevolent company, the source of all Java's warm fuzzy goodness, could even be named after the benevolent energy source that powers this planet...
Humans aren't evolved for philanthropy. Our brains care most about our own situation. When we hear "Millions of people suffer from this condition", we shrug and move on. It's just vocal cords, or it's just a stroke, or it's just depression. Once a particular condition affects us personally, we become fully aware of just how bad it really is. That's when we realize how much we take our voices for granted, or how difficult our life is without even a small part of our cognition, or how crushing sadness can affect our daily lives. That's when our brain now only allows us to donate time or money, but compels us to do something in the hope of getting relief. This is why so many nonprofits have awareness campaigns. The average person is utterly unaware of how bad life can be, because our brains aren't built for empathy.
In the interest of being pedantic, OpenJDK is the reference implementation. Oracle's JRE is the one that isn't compatible.
It's not the programmers that matter. Programmers can write Java and compile it with any JDK they please, and it should run on any JRE, including OpenJDK and its companion JRE project. I don't know how well they patch compared to Oracle, but it's an open-source replacement, which works pretty well in my experience.
Yes, I did write that. And yes, the stigma is still pervasive in areas dominated by the old ideology, including law, medicine (sadly), religion, and news media. Fortunately, mental health awareness is indeed spreading through the public. Help agencies are advertising suicide hotlines and informal discussion groups, and hanging up posters saying that "mental illness is an illness", highlighting how it's a condition affecting an otherwise-normal person. Then there are the many more popular artistic works like next to normal that are ever-so-slowly highlighting the fact that mental illness is a daily part of millions of lives, and only very few ever reach the point of seriously considering harming others.
It took a century after the Civil War for America to recognize that African Americans are regular people, and there's still some holdouts. We're only about 20 years into this fight.
It's a pretty crappy headline. My apologies for the length and tangential nature of this post. This is a very personal subject for me.
The problem is that we really don't have a decent understanding of the brain (or its abnormalities) at all. We have collections of symptoms appearing in varying severities with varying results, and we have treatments that alter those symptoms. As far as medicine goes, that's really about it.
The problem with a diagnosis is that it's a label. Someone who says "I'm bipolar" can expect that every action will be judged harshly as to whether it's actually their intended "normal" action, or the manifestation of their depression or mania, whichever happens to be the case that day (or hour). A child who's inattentive in school may just be bored, but the diagnosis of ADD opens the door to differently-structured classes that may help - as well as opening the door to ridicule for being different. Sometimes, yes, it's better to stay undiagnosed, and sometimes it's better to get the diagnosis and do nothing with it.
On the other hand, diagnosis is necessary for any treatment. Someone can understand "I'm sad all the time, and don't like it", but without the term "depression", it's very difficult to find information about how to improve. I've met several people who, in the 90's when depression was highly stigmatized, had traumatic experiences that they couldn't talk about and couldn't do anything to recover from, partly because they wouldn't consider the possibility of actually being "depressed".
To make matters worse, there are still an enormous number of people who simply deny the existence of any mental illness. They assume that kids with ADHD are just being active children, or people with depression are just sad, or people with bipolar disorder are just moody. The illness isn't what's visible from the outside, though. The illness is what's happening in the brain to cause the outward symptoms. The ADHD child can't calm down and focus - his mind always jumps to doing something else. The depressed people can't cheer up - even happy times are often plagued by a sadness that's always present in their minds. The bipolar person can't control their mood - the emotions are overwhelming.
What's happening now, albeit slowly, is that the stigma is being countered by awareness programs. This story is in a similar vein to the one a few days ago decrying DSM-5 for not being valid regarding mental health. As our understanding and openness about mental illness improves, we're starting to recognize that typical Western medicine may have done some serious harm to our society. A recent Broadway musical explored this question well.
In next to normal, a woman who grieved four months for a dead child was diagnosed as "depressed", and began 16 years of treatment. One of the questions explored is whether her illness was really because of the loss, or whether it was because of the trauma of ongoing treatment. There is no answer. There is no happy ending. There's only the promise of a next-to-normal life, where everything is perfect except for when it isn't, and there's always some new treatment to try.
That's the ongoing problem with our current handling of mental illness. We have collections of symptoms, and drugs that treat them, but we don't really understand how. The DSM-5 is so vague and imprecise that a particular symptom is painted with a wide brush to be a whole set of disorders. With no testing for suitability, medications are tried that aren't fully understood, in the hope that it's the right drug to set everything right quickly. When it doesn't work, another regimen is proposed, also with little or no testing for suitability. As the patient's treatment drags on, whole classes of drugs are ruled out for their side effects, then brought back be