However, the actual cause of death was apparently trauma that would not have occured had the restraints been better designed / utilized, and that information is of practical value to future vehicles and missions. That's the whole point of the report.
That they would've died of another cause, doesn't change that they did die of the stated cause.
Politics is surely part of the equation. You might recall not long ago there was a question over whether, in light of Russian treatment of the Ossetia conflict, the U.S. would extend the exemption that allowed NASA to contract for passage on Russian flights in spite of the Anti-Proliferation Act (can't remember the full title of the act; it's a US law that limits trade with countries that don't cooperate with our nuclear non-proliferation vision). I don't know what ever happened to that, but it highlights that relying on a tenuous ally may not always work.
Also, there is a real economic reason to favor American suppliers. Have you ever heard people say "The problem with the U.S. economy is that we don't actually make anything ourselves anymore"? Well, there's only one way to fix that.
Well, just to bring this around to the topic at hand...
What you say is all well and good, but this story isn't about the government contracting design work. The companies were already designing and building the vehicles for their own private ventures. The government is buying passage on the companies' ships; they're a customer of said private ventures.
Buying use of a tool or service is not the same as buying the design.
I'm not convinced one way or the other about this tax, but the "Apple can't maintain uniform $0.99/track pricing" argument seems a bit off to me, for two reasons.
The biggest reason is, I don't see it as the government's job in setting tax policy to accomodate an individual company's marketing desires. If the value of flat pricing across the board is so great, Apple can cut a few cents out of their own profits to maintain it by changing the base price they charge to NY residents so that the total with tax works out to $0.99. If it's not worth that much to them, then I don't see why anyone else should worry about it. It's a business decision for Apple to make, not a moral right.
Besides which, Apple has already done things that erode the idea of "every track is.99"; e.g. the DRM-free tracks that cost more.
This story seems surrounded by confusion about what trademarks are and how they work.
To be fair, I'm working from the American concept and assuming the Russian concept is comparable; if not, then it shouldn't be translated as "trademark"...
In any case, "public domain" has nothing to do with whether you can trademark something. The "age" of a mark (when it was first used) doesn't really matter.
What the businessman is trying to do is stupid (or, more likely, is a ploy that depends on other people being ill-informed), but not for the reasons you suggest. Trademark doesn't create the same type of monopoly that copyright does. I don't have to pay McDonalds to say "chicken mcnugget", and I dno't have to pay this guy to say:-).
I've heard this argued both ways about gravity, and I don't disbelieve what you're saying; but it's a bit off-topic since transistors don't operate on gravity.
You're right that it's not the speed of an electron that matters.
However, according to relativity, information itself cannot propagate faster than the speed of light. Using your "billiards" analogy, even though the cue ball doesn't have to make it across the table, the 8 ball can't "know" (or in any way react to the fact) that the cue ball started moving any sooner than an object, moving at the speed of light, could cross the table.
The speed of light is fast, but on the timescales we're discussing it does not translate to "almost instantaneous".
Your "party" analogy doesn't really hold up. It's unlikely that "calling you a jerk" could ever be prosecuted as defamation, even if you knew who the guy was. Defamation can come into play when the statement is public and is presented as factual...
Correcting for that... If a stranger at a party declares publicly that you are a jerk who beats his wife, and you find your way to pursue the matter in court, then parties with information that can identify the stranger may be compelled to reveal it, actually.
I don't really believe that "free speech" is the key issue. I think people like to conflate every legal issue in a case that involves someone saying something, with free speech. There may be a free speech issue at stake -- and if so it should be framed as a challenge to the defamation laws in general, rather than an attempt to end-run around them via anonymity.
Who does or doesn't have a responsibility to identify the person who did this or that, is much more general than defamation. It comes up routinely in copyright cases lately, for example.
Re:Priorities, people, priorities
on
The Mouse Turns 40
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
My inner pedant would assert that "dial" doesn't mean what you think it means. Meaning comes from usage; etymology just tries to make some sense of it.
But whatever, I'll play along: Actually, I have a rotary phone still hooked up. I almost never use it. In fact, I put it in a guest room. I find it funny (but I'm not sure if my guests do). I do test it from time to time to make sure the network where I live will still handle pulse dialing; surprisingly it will. So I've "dialed" a phone (in the sense you mean) within the past month.
The attackers routed checkfree.com to a blank page. This wasn't a phishing attack. They didn't replicate checkfree's site and try to get you to send money or give them your checkfree password. They showed you a blank page, and you would say "what the heck? Where's checkfree?"
But while you were saying "Where's checkfree", your computer was being infected with malware, which would intercept your usernames/passwords. Maybe to checkfree, or maybe to some unrelated site.
Why is that mode of attack any less applicable to a news website than an online checking provider? Any site you browse to could be hit by this attack, with effectiveness proportional to traffic and no other factor.
That depends on a lot of things, but the basic question is: is the computer really idle? What if it runs an AV scan overnight? Unless there's some way for a process to hint the OS as to what it's doing, suddenly it's going to seem like you need all the disk cache you can get.
I think you might have awfully high expectations of the paging algorithm, if you think it's "bad" because it paged out data that wasn't being used for something like 16 hours.
Perhaps the problem is that the cost/benefit values of "keep an app that isn't being touched in RAM" vs. "increase the available memory for disk caching", while they may be appropriate when the computer is actually being used, are not optimal for a computer left idle overnight. The idle computer has a higher-than-expected cost (in terms of user experience) associated with paging the idle app, and a lower-than-expected benefit to increasing the cache size.
"I believe there was a case recently where some poor child committed suicide after being persecuted online. So, yes, I think they should do something specfic about this."
Two thigns:
First, people have committed suicide after being bullied since before there was an Internet. Such cases illustrate serious problems, but those problems are not technology-related. The "cyber" prefix really is just media technophobia at work.
Second, there's more than one problem in play when bullying leads to suicide. The obvious problem is that the bully thought such activities were somehow acceptable. This is even more troubling in the case you cite, for the fact that several key bullying acts were committed by an alleged adult.
As inexcusable as that is, bullying does not explain a suicide all by itself. Nothing happens in a vacuum. What must have been the circumstances in this girl's life, that she was vulnerable to this attack? What were the other emotional pressures? Was there a lack of support in her life that led her to pin the entire value of her life to this faked relationship? Was there a lack of guidance that allowed her to get this close to someone before knowing enough to verify his existance?
Comfortable as it is to find one event and one person to blame for a tragedy, suicide isn't that simple.
"if you want a userbase (again, the something that other people develop with their time), testing, and relevency outside a small circle of people willing to do their own debugging, then yes, they do"
As you say, it goes back to the definition of "obligation". What you've pointed out is, if the project has cetain goals, there are certain things they would be wise to do to acheive those goals. That is not an obligation by any definition.
An obligation is something you have to do per some authority. You're right it doesn't have to be a legal authority -- it could be ethical, moral, religious, whatever. But "there are natural consequences you might not like to doing or not doing X" is not authority.
No, other people deciding to depend on my software does not create a commitment on my part.
It would be more correct to say, if someone decides to depend on my software without first securing a commitment from me (or from a third party capable of providing support based on the source code), that someone probably isn't a very good business-person.
So, if an individual project wants to be commercially viable, that project would be wise to think about a support model that offers its business users some assurances; but the answer to the general question "is an OSS project obligated to provide support" is still no.
"I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?"
Nothing at all would happen to the TWiki.net trademark. A trademark on a character name in a television show would not be in conflict with a trademark for a piece of software, just like the trademark of a music label is not (generally) in conflict with the trademark for a type of home computer.
No, it doesn't. Government exists to uphold rights, and the law exists to provide government one of the tools to do that. Rights belong to individuals, not "the public".
What makes a child pornographer a criminal is the concrete harm he does to an individual -- not some abstract harm to "the public good".
The system is designed around that. The bill of rights gives weight to the rights of the accused for two reasons. First, it is the job of the justice system to protect everyone's rights -- to defeind the rights of the victim while still respecting the rights of the accused. Second, when we don't respect the rights of the accused, we tend to conflate "accused" with "guilty", and then nobody's rights (including the victim) are protected.
If you dont respect the rules of the system even when they make it harder to catch the bad guy, then you're really asking for a rule-less system that enforces your will. But watch out -- yours isn't the will that's going to prevail if the system heads that way.
"With this decision, the courts have just given license to all of those who kidnap or exploit children to make this pornography"
No, they haven't. They have not made child porn legal; they have reminded the authorities that they still have to do their job according to the rules even when it's a job that really needs to be done.
"How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook."
If we left 'justice' in the hands of how those harmed by the crime feel, it would be revenge (which is not the same thing -- and which incidentally doesn't serve the "public good", either).
"the judicial tradition of suppressing evidence entirely because it was produced without a proper warrant is absurd. The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there. Instead, fine the police for doing the wrong thing"
Here, I agree -- to a point. It doesn't change the fact that in the context of the system as it exists, the court's action is correct, though; today the remedy for illegal search is suppression of evidence.
But yes, I think holding law enforcement personally responsible when they violate the rights of the accused would be more just than penalizing the victim (and any potential future victims) by preventing a conviction when the accused really is guilty -- if such a system can be made to work.
There are two problems with that, though, which I don't know how to resolve:
1) Having performed an illegal search, which results in the conviction of a child pornographer, a police officer goes on trial. What jury will convict him? If the answer is none and that's ok with you, then you're really saying that the accused shouldn't have had rights in the first place.
2) Being personally liable for mistakes can create an incentive to do less work. I'm not saying this justifies a lack of personal accountability in general, but you do have to have a system in which the police are confident "if I do the right thing, I won't be punished". That's harder than it sounds.
"No, just because you don't get spanked doesn't mean that an ethical obligation can be ignored"
I can only guess at what you think you're replying to, because the text you quoted from my post pretty much says: ethical obligations can't be ignored.
Perhaps where I wrote "when there are no negative consequences for doing the right thing", you read it as "no negative consequences for doing the wrong thing"; which I suppose would be a different philosophy altogether (yet one sufficiently at odds with the rest of my reply that I'm a bit surprised if that's what you thought you read).
The point is, most people prefer to talk about how ethical they are when being ethical has no cost. It's all well and good to say 'I prefer to act ethically all else being equal' -- which is essentially what such a person is saying -- but that is the least interesting scenario for talking about ethics. It's pretty much a curiosity.
When ethics actually matter, is when there is a cost to being ethical -- yet in those cases many people will use that cost to justify unethical behavior. Unfortunately, while it seems intuitive that a person with greater means would have more flexibility to take a hit for the sake of ethics, the reality seems to be that a person who's used to having more, feels entitled to more -- and so will sacrifice less in the name of ethics.
And if you ever wondered, when <insert crisis here> broke, how things could go so horribly wrong... it's because of people who think like this guy.
"Don't worry if it's the wrong thing to do; just document that it wasn't your idea!" And apparently never mind the idea of personal responsibility.
When there are no negative consequences for doing the right thing, ethics is mostly a curiosity. Ethics exist to guide you when the right path isn't easy. And yes, you are personally responsible for your own ethical behavior, regardless of whether someone with a bigger paycheck -- or even someone who signs your paycheck -- says otherwise.
Does it mean you have to walk? That depends on your boss. If you do, the best way to preserve your reputation is to avoid mud-slinging. Your current employer might want to try to harm your reputation, but it's extremely unlikely he'll get far (certainly not without exposing himself to legal liability). So just don't shoot yourself in the foot by ranting about the situation in interviews, etc.
"How the hell would shorts even work if they were somehow optional? Why would anyone pay money for them if, when the time came and the price of the stock had gone up (aka, you 'won' the bet) the other guy could just go 'Oh, nevermind, let's call it off.'?"
Well, keep in mind who the two parties to a naked short are:
1) The guy shorting the stock. He knows it's a naked short.
2) The guy who buys the shares from (1). He doesn't know it's a naked short. He doesn't know it's any kind of short at all. He's just buying some shares.
Selling you something I don't have (on the theory I can get it before settlement time) is risky, shady business. If your an honest investor, the "upside" of taking on the added risk (that you won't be able to get the shares in time at a "better" price) is that you don't have to pay someone to borrow their shares (or find a lender at all, I suppose).
Later failing to deliver what I sold is fraud, but it's not like I advertised at time of sale "I'm going to defraud you if this doesn't go my way".
Slashdot Mirror
That's one way of looking at it.
However, the actual cause of death was apparently trauma that would not have occured had the restraints been better designed / utilized, and that information is of practical value to future vehicles and missions. That's the whole point of the report.
That they would've died of another cause, doesn't change that they did die of the stated cause.
Really?
Would you ever call the support line of the guy who invented that kind of device?
I sure as hell wouldn't...
Politics is surely part of the equation. You might recall not long ago there was a question over whether, in light of Russian treatment of the Ossetia conflict, the U.S. would extend the exemption that allowed NASA to contract for passage on Russian flights in spite of the Anti-Proliferation Act (can't remember the full title of the act; it's a US law that limits trade with countries that don't cooperate with our nuclear non-proliferation vision). I don't know what ever happened to that, but it highlights that relying on a tenuous ally may not always work.
Also, there is a real economic reason to favor American suppliers. Have you ever heard people say "The problem with the U.S. economy is that we don't actually make anything ourselves anymore"? Well, there's only one way to fix that.
Well, just to bring this around to the topic at hand...
What you say is all well and good, but this story isn't about the government contracting design work. The companies were already designing and building the vehicles for their own private ventures. The government is buying passage on the companies' ships; they're a customer of said private ventures.
Buying use of a tool or service is not the same as buying the design.
I'm not convinced one way or the other about this tax, but the "Apple can't maintain uniform $0.99/track pricing" argument seems a bit off to me, for two reasons.
The biggest reason is, I don't see it as the government's job in setting tax policy to accomodate an individual company's marketing desires. If the value of flat pricing across the board is so great, Apple can cut a few cents out of their own profits to maintain it by changing the base price they charge to NY residents so that the total with tax works out to $0.99. If it's not worth that much to them, then I don't see why anyone else should worry about it. It's a business decision for Apple to make, not a moral right.
Besides which, Apple has already done things that erode the idea of "every track is .99"; e.g. the DRM-free tracks that cost more.
This story seems surrounded by confusion about what trademarks are and how they work.
To be fair, I'm working from the American concept and assuming the Russian concept is comparable; if not, then it shouldn't be translated as "trademark"...
In any case, "public domain" has nothing to do with whether you can trademark something. The "age" of a mark (when it was first used) doesn't really matter.
What the businessman is trying to do is stupid (or, more likely, is a ploy that depends on other people being ill-informed), but not for the reasons you suggest. Trademark doesn't create the same type of monopoly that copyright does. I don't have to pay McDonalds to say "chicken mcnugget", and I dno't have to pay this guy to say :-).
I've heard this argued both ways about gravity, and I don't disbelieve what you're saying; but it's a bit off-topic since transistors don't operate on gravity.
You're right that it's not the speed of an electron that matters.
However, according to relativity, information itself cannot propagate faster than the speed of light. Using your "billiards" analogy, even though the cue ball doesn't have to make it across the table, the 8 ball can't "know" (or in any way react to the fact) that the cue ball started moving any sooner than an object, moving at the speed of light, could cross the table.
The speed of light is fast, but on the timescales we're discussing it does not translate to "almost instantaneous".
Your "party" analogy doesn't really hold up. It's unlikely that "calling you a jerk" could ever be prosecuted as defamation, even if you knew who the guy was. Defamation can come into play when the statement is public and is presented as factual...
Correcting for that... If a stranger at a party declares publicly that you are a jerk who beats his wife, and you find your way to pursue the matter in court, then parties with information that can identify the stranger may be compelled to reveal it, actually.
I don't really believe that "free speech" is the key issue. I think people like to conflate every legal issue in a case that involves someone saying something, with free speech. There may be a free speech issue at stake -- and if so it should be framed as a challenge to the defamation laws in general, rather than an attempt to end-run around them via anonymity.
Who does or doesn't have a responsibility to identify the person who did this or that, is much more general than defamation. It comes up routinely in copyright cases lately, for example.
Yeah, but you know what nobody cares abuot?
This stupid debate over whether anyone cares!
My inner pedant would assert that "dial" doesn't mean what you think it means. Meaning comes from usage; etymology just tries to make some sense of it.
But whatever, I'll play along: Actually, I have a rotary phone still hooked up. I almost never use it. In fact, I put it in a guest room. I find it funny (but I'm not sure if my guests do). I do test it from time to time to make sure the network where I live will still handle pulse dialing; surprisingly it will. So I've "dialed" a phone (in the sense you mean) within the past month.
Why would that matter?
The attackers routed checkfree.com to a blank page. This wasn't a phishing attack. They didn't replicate checkfree's site and try to get you to send money or give them your checkfree password. They showed you a blank page, and you would say "what the heck? Where's checkfree?"
But while you were saying "Where's checkfree", your computer was being infected with malware, which would intercept your usernames/passwords. Maybe to checkfree, or maybe to some unrelated site.
Why is that mode of attack any less applicable to a news website than an online checking provider? Any site you browse to could be hit by this attack, with effectiveness proportional to traffic and no other factor.
That depends on a lot of things, but the basic question is: is the computer really idle? What if it runs an AV scan overnight? Unless there's some way for a process to hint the OS as to what it's doing, suddenly it's going to seem like you need all the disk cache you can get.
I think you might have awfully high expectations of the paging algorithm, if you think it's "bad" because it paged out data that wasn't being used for something like 16 hours.
Perhaps the problem is that the cost/benefit values of "keep an app that isn't being touched in RAM" vs. "increase the available memory for disk caching", while they may be appropriate when the computer is actually being used, are not optimal for a computer left idle overnight. The idle computer has a higher-than-expected cost (in terms of user experience) associated with paging the idle app, and a lower-than-expected benefit to increasing the cache size.
"I believe there was a case recently where some poor child committed suicide after being persecuted online. So, yes, I think they should do something specfic about this."
Two thigns:
First, people have committed suicide after being bullied since before there was an Internet. Such cases illustrate serious problems, but those problems are not technology-related. The "cyber" prefix really is just media technophobia at work.
Second, there's more than one problem in play when bullying leads to suicide. The obvious problem is that the bully thought such activities were somehow acceptable. This is even more troubling in the case you cite, for the fact that several key bullying acts were committed by an alleged adult.
As inexcusable as that is, bullying does not explain a suicide all by itself. Nothing happens in a vacuum. What must have been the circumstances in this girl's life, that she was vulnerable to this attack? What were the other emotional pressures? Was there a lack of support in her life that led her to pin the entire value of her life to this faked relationship? Was there a lack of guidance that allowed her to get this close to someone before knowing enough to verify his existance?
Comfortable as it is to find one event and one person to blame for a tragedy, suicide isn't that simple.
"if you want a userbase (again, the something that other people develop with their time), testing, and relevency outside a small circle of people willing to do their own debugging, then yes, they do"
As you say, it goes back to the definition of "obligation". What you've pointed out is, if the project has cetain goals, there are certain things they would be wise to do to acheive those goals. That is not an obligation by any definition.
An obligation is something you have to do per some authority. You're right it doesn't have to be a legal authority -- it could be ethical, moral, religious, whatever. But "there are natural consequences you might not like to doing or not doing X" is not authority.
It's not an obligation, it's a choice.
Ah, irony. It's not just for breakfast anymore.
No, other people deciding to depend on my software does not create a commitment on my part.
It would be more correct to say, if someone decides to depend on my software without first securing a commitment from me (or from a third party capable of providing support based on the source code), that someone probably isn't a very good business-person.
So, if an individual project wants to be commercially viable, that project would be wise to think about a support model that offers its business users some assurances; but the answer to the general question "is an OSS project obligated to provide support" is still no.
"I wonder if that show got a trademark on 'TWIKI' and if so, what would happen to the TWIKI.NET trademark?"
Nothing at all would happen to the TWiki.net trademark. A trademark on a character name in a television show would not be in conflict with a trademark for a piece of software, just like the trademark of a music label is not (generally) in conflict with the trademark for a type of home computer.
"Are those 2 conditions even legal?"
I don't see anything illegal about them, but can you elaborate on why you think they may not be?
"The law exists to serve the public good"
No, it doesn't. Government exists to uphold rights, and the law exists to provide government one of the tools to do that. Rights belong to individuals, not "the public".
What makes a child pornographer a criminal is the concrete harm he does to an individual -- not some abstract harm to "the public good".
The system is designed around that. The bill of rights gives weight to the rights of the accused for two reasons. First, it is the job of the justice system to protect everyone's rights -- to defeind the rights of the victim while still respecting the rights of the accused. Second, when we don't respect the rights of the accused, we tend to conflate "accused" with "guilty", and then nobody's rights (including the victim) are protected.
If you dont respect the rules of the system even when they make it harder to catch the bad guy, then you're really asking for a rule-less system that enforces your will. But watch out -- yours isn't the will that's going to prevail if the system heads that way.
"With this decision, the courts have just given license to all of those who kidnap or exploit children to make this pornography"
No, they haven't. They have not made child porn legal; they have reminded the authorities that they still have to do their job according to the rules even when it's a job that really needs to be done.
"How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook."
If we left 'justice' in the hands of how those harmed by the crime feel, it would be revenge (which is not the same thing -- and which incidentally doesn't serve the "public good", either).
"the judicial tradition of suppressing evidence entirely because it was produced without a proper warrant is absurd. The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there. Instead, fine the police for doing the wrong thing"
Here, I agree -- to a point. It doesn't change the fact that in the context of the system as it exists, the court's action is correct, though; today the remedy for illegal search is suppression of evidence.
But yes, I think holding law enforcement personally responsible when they violate the rights of the accused would be more just than penalizing the victim (and any potential future victims) by preventing a conviction when the accused really is guilty -- if such a system can be made to work.
There are two problems with that, though, which I don't know how to resolve:
1) Having performed an illegal search, which results in the conviction of a child pornographer, a police officer goes on trial. What jury will convict him? If the answer is none and that's ok with you, then you're really saying that the accused shouldn't have had rights in the first place.
2) Being personally liable for mistakes can create an incentive to do less work. I'm not saying this justifies a lack of personal accountability in general, but you do have to have a system in which the police are confident "if I do the right thing, I won't be punished". That's harder than it sounds.
"No, just because you don't get spanked doesn't mean that an ethical obligation can be ignored"
I can only guess at what you think you're replying to, because the text you quoted from my post pretty much says: ethical obligations can't be ignored.
Perhaps where I wrote "when there are no negative consequences for doing the right thing", you read it as "no negative consequences for doing the wrong thing"; which I suppose would be a different philosophy altogether (yet one sufficiently at odds with the rest of my reply that I'm a bit surprised if that's what you thought you read).
The point is, most people prefer to talk about how ethical they are when being ethical has no cost. It's all well and good to say 'I prefer to act ethically all else being equal' -- which is essentially what such a person is saying -- but that is the least interesting scenario for talking about ethics. It's pretty much a curiosity.
When ethics actually matter, is when there is a cost to being ethical -- yet in those cases many people will use that cost to justify unethical behavior. Unfortunately, while it seems intuitive that a person with greater means would have more flexibility to take a hit for the sake of ethics, the reality seems to be that a person who's used to having more, feels entitled to more -- and so will sacrifice less in the name of ethics.
And if you ever wondered, when <insert crisis here> broke, how things could go so horribly wrong... it's because of people who think like this guy.
"Don't worry if it's the wrong thing to do; just document that it wasn't your idea!" And apparently never mind the idea of personal responsibility.
When there are no negative consequences for doing the right thing, ethics is mostly a curiosity. Ethics exist to guide you when the right path isn't easy. And yes, you are personally responsible for your own ethical behavior, regardless of whether someone with a bigger paycheck -- or even someone who signs your paycheck -- says otherwise.
Does it mean you have to walk? That depends on your boss. If you do, the best way to preserve your reputation is to avoid mud-slinging. Your current employer might want to try to harm your reputation, but it's extremely unlikely he'll get far (certainly not without exposing himself to legal liability). So just don't shoot yourself in the foot by ranting about the situation in interviews, etc.
And while the formalities and procedure are surely different, you can try to get an award of court costs in the U.S., too.
But to the GP's point, other than being pretty much the same, the systems are completely opposite.
"How the hell would shorts even work if they were somehow optional? Why would anyone pay money for them if, when the time came and the price of the stock had gone up (aka, you 'won' the bet) the other guy could just go 'Oh, nevermind, let's call it off.'?"
Well, keep in mind who the two parties to a naked short are:
1) The guy shorting the stock. He knows it's a naked short.
2) The guy who buys the shares from (1). He doesn't know it's a naked short. He doesn't know it's any kind of short at all. He's just buying some shares.
Selling you something I don't have (on the theory I can get it before settlement time) is risky, shady business. If your an honest investor, the "upside" of taking on the added risk (that you won't be able to get the shares in time at a "better" price) is that you don't have to pay someone to borrow their shares (or find a lender at all, I suppose).
Later failing to deliver what I sold is fraud, but it's not like I advertised at time of sale "I'm going to defraud you if this doesn't go my way".