Socialist, socialistic or just liberal... Its hard to draw a line and say past this point is bad. I would however say I would probably not enjoy living in a place with the ideology you seem to be for.
I find your "facts" to be mildly humorous, I am supposedly in the culture of "me" but what you like is free this, free that, short hours and perks! How much more of a "me" motivation can you get then basing your life on what you can take from other people (as free really only means free to you right)? If we could find a decent way to co-exist I would be for it but unfortunately it appears to me that your "free" can only come at the expensive of my blood, sweat and tears. I would rather work 50 hours a week as a free man than 30 as a slave or 0 as a parasite. I could live with paying tribute to make you and your kind leave me alone but that has always been a problem hasn't it? My resources are finite as I am only human, but your desires are endless as you are also. To enslave my mind to your stomach is a tragedy.
The part you probably can't, or don't want to, understand is that my way of life is not about "me" it's about how we interact with each other. I can not view a system as moral that requires as a basic tenant that people are to be slaves to others. The profits of my mind and my body are not public property and any time they are used as such it is an affront to the best in all of us as it makes me a slave and others parasites. What I can not understand is how a man could allow himself to become a parasite in the first place.
Hopefully you retain at least enough moral fortitude that you plan to use your college degree for some good, even if it is just supporting yourself, to pay back those who are sending you.
All we need is more laws that make it harder to make a living. Oh, and France as your example... From everything I can find France's normal unemployment rate is like ours is now, they are less productive (in total but on par per hour) and there seems to be articles taking the "happier" rating both ways. Oh, and financially our poor are often better off then their middle class so I am not really interested in trying to change our economy to be like theirs.
I find it funny that you would regard something like that as shocking at all or even think that they were trying for shocking. I make X my costs are Y I want to see a return on my investment of Z. My costs go up, due to anything not just increased health care costs, so either I need to charge more or cut some costs... Seems pretty simple to me.
As for the whole "companies are out to get you" rant, you know after 15 years of working at 5 jobs (from cashier guy to engineer) I can truthfully say I have yet to be employed by a company that is out to do their employees harm. In fact most of them seem to bend too far the other way by adopting union like policies akin to tenure that coddle people and kill there drive to excel.
Please provide a citation as I can find no information to back this up.
According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States or maybe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States or how about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
From what I can tell you have applied the poverty level (based on per household) to the income level (based on per person) to create a highly inflammatory and entirely incorrect statistic. It appears that poverty levels in the USA are 10%-15% and have been for the last 40 years (it appears to have been higher before that but stats are harder to come by).
This doesn't even take into account the poverty itself is a rather amorphous thing and as some scholars have pointed out the "poor" in America often have bigger houses and better/more things than the "middle class" in Europe.
This is not to say that there are not people who can truly use some help but given we are one of the few countries on earth that no longer track statistics on deaths due to starvation because it is so rare... I would say we have not done too bad.
I mean the KKK in a lot of ways is like the Nazis in that you don't bring it into a conversation unless your goal is to smear the other side with it. While I would agree technically it is only comparing a black person giving money to the KKK to a poor person supporting McCain but obviously the real comparison it is trying to draw is between republicans and the KKK as he thinks supporting one is like supporting the other (I guess unless the argument can be made that there is something specific to McCain that makes him KKK like but given the "right wing" comment that is unlikely).
If he was trying to compare groups that support things not in their short-term financial good for reasons unknown to the author I am sure he could have come up with a real example (religion, altruism or maybe family preservation would be good topics). What he did do was make a comparison that was just designed to try to invoke not just classist imagery but racist imagery as well.
Wow, took remarkably little time to get to "Byrd's Law of KKK Analogies".
So, let me see if I can get this straight you want to compare one of our political parties to the KKK (oddly enough though not the party that till recently had a sitting former KKK member). Now the proof that you use for this is that is that they want to "Give teh rich more MONIES" (direct copy from your post). Now, anyone with half a brain already knows your statement is a little disingenuous as the "rich" are usual asking to keep more of their money as they pay the majority of the taxes anyway. Add to this that the life expectancy of the "poor" people in the USA is over 67 years much greater than large swaths of the world and I think it is pretty obvious that we are not out committing mass murder on poor people.
Now, if you want to have a real conversation on why poor back area people identify with the party that says it is for self-reliance, justice (no, not social justice talking about the other criminal type), responsibility and God over the one that says we will get you more stuff... We can have a go at it but please the whole KKK argument is so silly that you might as well just go all the way and call them Nazis so everyone knows its just not worth the effort to post a response.
While true I don't think it will be very helpful. By the same token someone could say that any plain text file was really an encryption of some other file that was perfectly harmless. The problem comes in when you would either have to remember thousands of key phrases or you would have to have these keys already generated somewhere for it to be believable. So without considerable preparation it would be an obvious lie.
I would hate to say what a court would do any more as they seem to be very flaky but I know that if I was on a jury it would hold very little water with me. Remember "reasonable doubt" does not require the jury to believe every crackpot thing presented to them otherwise nobody would ever been convicted as everyone could just jump straight to the "aliens did it" or some other lame excuse.
I think your N*2^249 number only holds true if you you are encrypting each block with a different key. If you are just using one key as would be normal you can have no more possible encryption/decryption files than you have key space which if I understand AES-256 correctly means 2^256.
Therefore, any data source significantly larger than 2^256 will have almost no chance of decrypting to a specific text.
Sorry but you incorrectly (or more accurately incompletely) apply math to try and prove your point.
If f is an algorithm/key pair, d is your data and e is the encrypted information then you could say it looks something like this. f(d) = e
If F is all possible algorithm/key pairs and it is limited to 2^256 options then for any given data only 2^256 encryptions are possible F(d) = e
In reality you would probably not even get the full 2^256 as there are almost always a few entropy issues that make f(d) not evenly distribute the changes from d to e without any collisions.
So, if you wish to be able to produce all possible files from one source file you source can have no more than 2^256 variations or 256 bits of data. Further more we can see that if we had just twice as much data (512b) then there would be a full 2^256-1 files that we could never create or a probability of 1/(2^256) of us being able to create a file given a specific data set and any key.
As can be seen if you got to any file of real size then numbers become so astronomically log against as to say it is virtually impossible.
This of course is based on a given encryption algorithm. If you wish to generalize it and say for any set of data an encryption algorithm could be created that could take a known key and known encrypted data and generate a known output file then you would be correct but quite useless as far as I can tell.
Either we ought to be trying to protect people from themselves or we ought to be letting people deal with the consequences of their actions.
I think drugs ought to be legal but their use should be legally construed as pre-mediation of any actions taken while under their influence. If you want the right to do whatever you want with your body you need to take responsibility for it (with almost non-existent exceptions). If a guy gets drunk and beats his kids to death he is just as immoral as a gang-banger that guns them down in cold blood or an LSD user that runs them over when they have a flashback while driving. If you want the privileges of being what I would consider an adult you should have the responsibility as well. I would also be for the receiving of all government social services being contingent of not taking any drugs as I really shouldn't have to pay for others poor decisions.
There is one other way that I could think of that drugs could be legalized and I would be agree with it, in one word Coventry. If we presume that people are unable to take responsibility for their own actions then the only thing left to us is for us to take responsibility for there actions. I would be for the construction of a set of government run "brothels" where those things deemed destructive to society were legal. The catch is that you should not be allowed to re-enter society (leave the facility in this case) until the negative effects had worn off. I would be fine for this on many social problems prostitution, drugs and alcohol all become moot problems in my mind if the effects are limited. Make sure the costs to run it are included in the cost of the drugs/act and it would even be self-sustaining. I am unsure of how some drugs like LSD could ever be made economically feasible as with something like flashbacks you would probably have to be there forever but as long as everyone knows whats going on when they sign up for it I am OK with it.
Oh, come on! Are you really arguing that people have a moral obligation to be lead to the slaughter like sheep so that the paperwork is easier? No law/moral is just that requires a man to immolate himself and to become prey to the wicked.
I am sure the defenders in either of your cases would much rather have a fighting chance and have to explain themselves afterwords. No government can or should be able to protect you from all things, it is up to you to take charge of your own life.
Ah, but its a brave new world where the client/server relationship is becoming fuzzier all the time. The part I think you are missing is that if you read the actual post it is obvious that everything that was crashing was applications on clients computers. It appears that some clients are promoted to server status to handle routing requests.
As for bad design/software I would instead say they had features without consideration of consequences. Here are where their problems are from what I can see.
1. Non-Patched Nodes Become Servers - Seriously if you are relying on your customers computer to be part of your infrastructure you would think that you would want to use only fully patched versions of your application for this.
2. Failed Message Queue - In an attempt to deliver messages to offline/crashed users they are queuing the messages and delivering them later. These types of systems ALWAYS exacerbate load problems unless implemented extremely carefully. Interestingly they hit both of the major issues with them at one go. First they had a bug that caused messages to crash systems (which they blindly kept trying to deliver). Then they had more of these messages out there causing more traffic on an already crippled network.
3. Shutdown On Overflow - Since they are running on clients networks if the load becomes too great they shutdown clients running as servers when they are running too hot. This one is just made to cause cascading failures. While I an unsure how their lookup domains are set up it would probably be much better to spawn new servers to deal with increased load instead of shutting down working servers.
You could go on a bike ride with your child. Either separate bikes, a two person bike, or at 4 probably you walking.
You could take your child to an out of the way place to ride. I always found a backyard or parking lot to be a good place to teach a child to ride a bike.
Given the relative speeds of a 4 year old to an old lady you could be anywhere within 20 yards of your kid and still stop this one.
How you don't stop this collision is that you say your not at fault. You either let your child go out on their own or you don't supervise them close enough.
In longer...
I think almost by definition this is the mothers fault. With few exceptions parents ought to be responsible for the actions of their children. Those exceptions being centered around people who put themselves in harms way.
Obviously, while the lady says she was "supervising" if should couldn't keep a pair of toddlers from running over a little old lady on a public side walk she was doing a poor job of it. While your 12 inches is silly (all puns intended) if you are going to supervise you should be looking out for problems and be close enough to intervene. If they could run over this lady they could probably have been run over by a car just as easily.
As for your co-dependent theory I just don't see it. In fact those people who I know who are the most co-dependent are those who's parents didn't love them enough to at least keep track of them as kids. In my opinion this is another psudo-psychological myth right up there with the whole "be your child's friend" junk that is really just selfish parenting.
God, I love it when irrational people jump straight to Godwin's law *. I have to ask are you really so simple that you equate an orginization which is a little too conservative in my taste with Hitler? Do you think everyone with a different point of view is evil? Seems a little sad to me. May I suggest reading the first artical for a European example of why this is true.
To equate a Liberal Brainwashing with being Liberal is a stretch. There are many of us who are able to weather the experience with some level of grace.
To equate increased welfare with decreased crime is as far as I can tell just not a realistic assertion. This is especially if you are talking about clasic no strings attached welfare.
Previous studies have pointed to the gene being related to impulsivity, a lack of thinking though the consequence of your actions. I think you have a much better chance of finding the roots of modern liberalism there...
Seriously, I think using WoW as an example here is funny. While offloading your bandwidth costs to your clients is itself a morally questionable action doing it so poorly time and time again is just wrong. WoW's distrobution method has been plagued with problems since it's inception and at least 4 versions of the patcher are acknolaged to be just outright broken. Add to this the configuration problems and issues with multiple computers NATed to the same IP and I would say it has been less then a rousing success for them. I mean really, it took many people more than 4 hours (and 20-30MB of uploading) to receive a 10MB patch no more than a month ago.
Honestly, for free things with no clear distrobution channels I see no reason that torrenting should not be used. In the case of things that I pay for, companies should just man up and pay for the bandwidth/servers themselves.
This sounds no different than any ticketing/communication tracking software I have had to labor under in my time. The falicy of this type of system is that they can't make the data worth something in an automated fashion as the system does not have the smarts to actualy assign value to the communications. Any of these systems that rely on someone to read the messages and figure out what is actualy going on is doomed to failure either because of coruption or because those who will monitor the messages can not understand what is actualy going on (if it doesn't die from apathy before then). What always seems to happen is that this system will turn into a nice little set of reports and metrics that are virtualy meaningless. These reports will turn into company goals and we will breed a new set of employees that do nothing but try to make themselves look good on the report.
Managment will praise the system as they subvert it to their own ends.
Manager to Boss - "I should get a large raise this year as I have increased performance by 10% based on this metiric of Posts/Call (or some equaly silly mettric)."
Manager to Employee -" I want us to work together, even if you know the answer to someones problem I want you to make sure you ask at least one of your team mates to make sure they agree."
Work Axiom - "You get what you measure"
All of these type of systems are trying to turn worthless managers into somethng useful. The problem with this is that if the manager is able to use this type of system to effect they can probably get the same results without the system. I have yet to work in a place where a good manager doesn't know (in general) what I am doing to help the company or where a bad manager will care.
Sorry but I can't let this one pass without commenting. How can you look at this and say the author is getting a bad deal here?
Let's see we have 2 posibilities here:
1. 70 years + Remaining Segment of Authors Life
-or-
2. 95 years + 0-25 years of time from creation to publication.
So the author's rule is always better if he lives more than 50 years after creating his work. If the work is published imediatly the author's rule is always better if he lives more than 25 years. Assuming he lives in the US with a life expectancy of of 78 years and publishes quickly he will spend more than half of his adult life getting the better part of this deal.
In fact this being set as 70 years after the authors death or 95-120 years after creation there is very little chance that those who origionaly created this work will have anything to do with the copyright any more. Be the eventual copyright holder a heir or a corporation I doubt the time difference will be of much significants at that point given none of the people benifiting will be those who helped with the creation of the work.
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Socialist, socialistic or just liberal... Its hard to draw a line and say past this point is bad. I would however say I would probably not enjoy living in a place with the ideology you seem to be for.
I find your "facts" to be mildly humorous, I am supposedly in the culture of "me" but what you like is free this, free that, short hours and perks! How much more of a "me" motivation can you get then basing your life on what you can take from other people (as free really only means free to you right)? If we could find a decent way to co-exist I would be for it but unfortunately it appears to me that your "free" can only come at the expensive of my blood, sweat and tears. I would rather work 50 hours a week as a free man than 30 as a slave or 0 as a parasite. I could live with paying tribute to make you and your kind leave me alone but that has always been a problem hasn't it? My resources are finite as I am only human, but your desires are endless as you are also. To enslave my mind to your stomach is a tragedy.
The part you probably can't, or don't want to, understand is that my way of life is not about "me" it's about how we interact with each other. I can not view a system as moral that requires as a basic tenant that people are to be slaves to others. The profits of my mind and my body are not public property and any time they are used as such it is an affront to the best in all of us as it makes me a slave and others parasites. What I can not understand is how a man could allow himself to become a parasite in the first place.
Hopefully you retain at least enough moral fortitude that you plan to use your college degree for some good, even if it is just supporting yourself, to pay back those who are sending you.
Man do I hope that was sarcasm.
All we need is more laws that make it harder to make a living. Oh, and France as your example... From everything I can find France's normal unemployment rate is like ours is now, they are less productive (in total but on par per hour) and there seems to be articles taking the "happier" rating both ways. Oh, and financially our poor are often better off then their middle class so I am not really interested in trying to change our economy to be like theirs.
But that's just me,
I find it funny that you would regard something like that as shocking at all or even think that they were trying for shocking. I make X my costs are Y I want to see a return on my investment of Z. My costs go up, due to anything not just increased health care costs, so either I need to charge more or cut some costs... Seems pretty simple to me.
As for the whole "companies are out to get you" rant, you know after 15 years of working at 5 jobs (from cashier guy to engineer) I can truthfully say I have yet to be employed by a company that is out to do their employees harm. In fact most of them seem to bend too far the other way by adopting union like policies akin to tenure that coddle people and kill there drive to excel.
But that's just what I have seen,
Please provide a citation as I can find no information to back this up.
According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
or maybe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
or how about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
From what I can tell you have applied the poverty level (based on per household) to the income level (based on per person) to create a highly inflammatory and entirely incorrect statistic. It appears that poverty levels in the USA are 10%-15% and have been for the last 40 years (it appears to have been higher before that but stats are harder to come by).
This doesn't even take into account the poverty itself is a rather amorphous thing and as some scholars have pointed out the "poor" in America often have bigger houses and better/more things than the "middle class" in Europe.
This is not to say that there are not people who can truly use some help but given we are one of the few countries on earth that no longer track statistics on deaths due to starvation because it is so rare... I would say we have not done too bad.
But that's just my opinion,
Do you really think that?
I mean the KKK in a lot of ways is like the Nazis in that you don't bring it into a conversation unless your goal is to smear the other side with it. While I would agree technically it is only comparing a black person giving money to the KKK to a poor person supporting McCain but obviously the real comparison it is trying to draw is between republicans and the KKK as he thinks supporting one is like supporting the other (I guess unless the argument can be made that there is something specific to McCain that makes him KKK like but given the "right wing" comment that is unlikely).
If he was trying to compare groups that support things not in their short-term financial good for reasons unknown to the author I am sure he could have come up with a real example (religion, altruism or maybe family preservation would be good topics). What he did do was make a comparison that was just designed to try to invoke not just classist imagery but racist imagery as well.
But that's just my opinion,
Wow, took remarkably little time to get to "Byrd's Law of KKK Analogies".
So, let me see if I can get this straight you want to compare one of our political parties to the KKK (oddly enough though not the party that till recently had a sitting former KKK member). Now the proof that you use for this is that is that they want to "Give teh rich more MONIES" (direct copy from your post). Now, anyone with half a brain already knows your statement is a little disingenuous as the "rich" are usual asking to keep more of their money as they pay the majority of the taxes anyway. Add to this that the life expectancy of the "poor" people in the USA is over 67 years much greater than large swaths of the world and I think it is pretty obvious that we are not out committing mass murder on poor people.
Now, if you want to have a real conversation on why poor back area people identify with the party that says it is for self-reliance, justice (no, not social justice talking about the other criminal type), responsibility and God over the one that says we will get you more stuff... We can have a go at it but please the whole KKK argument is so silly that you might as well just go all the way and call them Nazis so everyone knows its just not worth the effort to post a response.
But that's just what I think,
While true I don't think it will be very helpful. By the same token someone could say that any plain text file was really an encryption of some other file that was perfectly harmless. The problem comes in when you would either have to remember thousands of key phrases or you would have to have these keys already generated somewhere for it to be believable. So without considerable preparation it would be an obvious lie.
I would hate to say what a court would do any more as they seem to be very flaky but I know that if I was on a jury it would hold very little water with me. Remember "reasonable doubt" does not require the jury to believe every crackpot thing presented to them otherwise nobody would ever been convicted as everyone could just jump straight to the "aliens did it" or some other lame excuse.
But that's just my opinion,
I think your N*2^249 number only holds true if you you are encrypting each block with a different key. If you are just using one key as would be normal you can have no more possible encryption/decryption files than you have key space which if I understand AES-256 correctly means 2^256.
Therefore, any data source significantly larger than 2^256 will have almost no chance of decrypting to a specific text.
Sorry but you incorrectly (or more accurately incompletely) apply math to try and prove your point.
If f is an algorithm/key pair, d is your data and e is the encrypted information then you could say it looks something like this.
f(d) = e
If F is all possible algorithm/key pairs and it is limited to 2^256 options then for any given data only 2^256 encryptions are possible
F(d) = e
In reality you would probably not even get the full 2^256 as there are almost always a few entropy issues that make f(d) not evenly distribute the changes from d to e without any collisions.
So, if you wish to be able to produce all possible files from one source file you source can have no more than 2^256 variations or 256 bits of data. Further more we can see that if we had just twice as much data (512b) then there would be a full 2^256-1 files that we could never create or a probability of 1/(2^256) of us being able to create a file given a specific data set and any key.
As can be seen if you got to any file of real size then numbers become so astronomically log against as to say it is virtually impossible.
This of course is based on a given encryption algorithm. If you wish to generalize it and say for any set of data an encryption algorithm could be created that could take a known key and known encrypted data and generate a known output file then you would be correct but quite useless as far as I can tell.
Either we ought to be trying to protect people from themselves or we ought to be letting people deal with the consequences of their actions.
I think drugs ought to be legal but their use should be legally construed as pre-mediation of any actions taken while under their influence. If you want the right to do whatever you want with your body you need to take responsibility for it (with almost non-existent exceptions). If a guy gets drunk and beats his kids to death he is just as immoral as a gang-banger that guns them down in cold blood or an LSD user that runs them over when they have a flashback while driving. If you want the privileges of being what I would consider an adult you should have the responsibility as well. I would also be for the receiving of all government social services being contingent of not taking any drugs as I really shouldn't have to pay for others poor decisions.
There is one other way that I could think of that drugs could be legalized and I would be agree with it, in one word Coventry. If we presume that people are unable to take responsibility for their own actions then the only thing left to us is for us to take responsibility for there actions. I would be for the construction of a set of government run "brothels" where those things deemed destructive to society were legal. The catch is that you should not be allowed to re-enter society (leave the facility in this case) until the negative effects had worn off. I would be fine for this on many social problems prostitution, drugs and alcohol all become moot problems in my mind if the effects are limited. Make sure the costs to run it are included in the cost of the drugs/act and it would even be self-sustaining. I am unsure of how some drugs like LSD could ever be made economically feasible as with something like flashbacks you would probably have to be there forever but as long as everyone knows whats going on when they sign up for it I am OK with it.
Of course that's just what I think,
Yep, seems to be using more CPU time to render it now. Have had IE8 warn me that the page is not behaving twice so far.
Oh, come on! Are you really arguing that people have a moral obligation to be lead to the slaughter like sheep so that the paperwork is easier? No law/moral is just that requires a man to immolate himself and to become prey to the wicked.
I am sure the defenders in either of your cases would much rather have a fighting chance and have to explain themselves afterwords. No government can or should be able to protect you from all things, it is up to you to take charge of your own life.
But that is just my opinion,
Ah, but its a brave new world where the client/server relationship is becoming fuzzier all the time. The part I think you are missing is that if you read the actual post it is obvious that everything that was crashing was applications on clients computers. It appears that some clients are promoted to server status to handle routing requests.
As for bad design/software I would instead say they had features without consideration of consequences. Here are where their problems are from what I can see.
1. Non-Patched Nodes Become Servers - Seriously if you are relying on your customers computer to be part of your infrastructure you would think that you would want to use only fully patched versions of your application for this.
2. Failed Message Queue - In an attempt to deliver messages to offline/crashed users they are queuing the messages and delivering them later. These types of systems ALWAYS exacerbate load problems unless implemented extremely carefully. Interestingly they hit both of the major issues with them at one go. First they had a bug that caused messages to crash systems (which they blindly kept trying to deliver). Then they had more of these messages out there causing more traffic on an already crippled network.
3. Shutdown On Overflow - Since they are running on clients networks if the load becomes too great they shutdown clients running as servers when they are running too hot. This one is just made to cause cascading failures. While I an unsure how their lookup domains are set up it would probably be much better to spawn new servers to deal with increased load instead of shutting down working servers.
But that is just what I think,
How you don't stop this collision is that you say your not at fault. You either let your child go out on their own or you don't supervise them close enough.
In short Yes, in long Hell Yes.
In longer...
I think almost by definition this is the mothers fault. With few exceptions parents ought to be responsible for the actions of their children. Those exceptions being centered around people who put themselves in harms way.
Obviously, while the lady says she was "supervising" if should couldn't keep a pair of toddlers from running over a little old lady on a public side walk she was doing a poor job of it. While your 12 inches is silly (all puns intended) if you are going to supervise you should be looking out for problems and be close enough to intervene. If they could run over this lady they could probably have been run over by a car just as easily.
As for your co-dependent theory I just don't see it. In fact those people who I know who are the most co-dependent are those who's parents didn't love them enough to at least keep track of them as kids. In my opinion this is another psudo-psychological myth right up there with the whole "be your child's friend" junk that is really just selfish parenting.
But, that's just my opinion.
God, I love it when irrational people jump straight to Godwin's law *. I have to ask are you really so simple that you equate an orginization which is a little too conservative in my taste with Hitler? Do you think everyone with a different point of view is evil? Seems a little sad to me. May I suggest reading the first artical for a European example of why this is true.
Also depending on the type of crime some EU contries don't look all that hot...
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rob_percap-crime-robberies-per-capita
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
To equate a Liberal Brainwashing with being Liberal is a stretch. There are many of us who are able to weather the experience with some level of grace.
To equate increased welfare with decreased crime is as far as I can tell just not a realistic assertion. This is especially if you are talking about clasic no strings attached welfare.
Forcing Welfare Receipients To Work Decreases Crime - Danish
http://ideas.repec.org/p/qed/wpaper/1236.html
Welfare Promotes Single Parent Families Which Promots Crime - USA
http://www.heritage.org/research/testimony/the-effects-of-welfare-reform
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-wc67.html
Previous studies have pointed to the gene being related to impulsivity, a lack of thinking though the consequence of your actions. I think you have a much better chance of finding the roots of modern liberalism there...
Seriously, I think using WoW as an example here is funny. While offloading your bandwidth costs to your clients is itself a morally questionable action doing it so poorly time and time again is just wrong. WoW's distrobution method has been plagued with problems since it's inception and at least 4 versions of the patcher are acknolaged to be just outright broken. Add to this the configuration problems and issues with multiple computers NATed to the same IP and I would say it has been less then a rousing success for them. I mean really, it took many people more than 4 hours (and 20-30MB of uploading) to receive a 10MB patch no more than a month ago.
Honestly, for free things with no clear distrobution channels I see no reason that torrenting should not be used. In the case of things that I pay for, companies should just man up and pay for the bandwidth/servers themselves.
This sounds no different than any ticketing/communication tracking software I have had to labor under in my time. The falicy of this type of system is that they can't make the data worth something in an automated fashion as the system does not have the smarts to actualy assign value to the communications. Any of these systems that rely on someone to read the messages and figure out what is actualy going on is doomed to failure either because of coruption or because those who will monitor the messages can not understand what is actualy going on (if it doesn't die from apathy before then). What always seems to happen is that this system will turn into a nice little set of reports and metrics that are virtualy meaningless. These reports will turn into company goals and we will breed a new set of employees that do nothing but try to make themselves look good on the report.
Managment will praise the system as they subvert it to their own ends.
Manager to Boss - "I should get a large raise this year as I have increased performance by 10% based on this metiric of Posts/Call (or some equaly silly mettric)."
Manager to Employee -" I want us to work together, even if you know the answer to someones problem I want you to make sure you ask at least one of your team mates to make sure they agree."
Work Axiom - "You get what you measure"
All of these type of systems are trying to turn worthless managers into somethng useful. The problem with this is that if the manager is able to use this type of system to effect they can probably get the same results without the system. I have yet to work in a place where a good manager doesn't know (in general) what I am doing to help the company or where a bad manager will care.
Sorry but I can't let this one pass without commenting. How can you look at this and say the author is getting a bad deal here?
Let's see we have 2 posibilities here:
1. 70 years + Remaining Segment of Authors Life
-or-
2. 95 years + 0-25 years of time from creation to publication.
So the author's rule is always better if he lives more than 50 years after creating his work. If the work is published imediatly the author's rule is always better if he lives more than 25 years. Assuming he lives in the US with a life expectancy of of 78 years and publishes quickly he will spend more than half of his adult life getting the better part of this deal.
In fact this being set as 70 years after the authors death or 95-120 years after creation there is very little chance that those who origionaly created this work will have anything to do with the copyright any more. Be the eventual copyright holder a heir or a corporation I doubt the time difference will be of much significants at that point given none of the people benifiting will be those who helped with the creation of the work.