We all know that Microsoft is unethical (despite receiving an ethics award). I'm sure that at some point, Microsoft has happened to do some good by cheating someone--maybe they drove a company out of business but unknown to them if the company had survived it would have committed bank fraud.
That doesn't make cheating people into a good thing. It just means that if you keep on doing lots of damage sooner or later by pure chance you'll hit a target that deserves it. Assange doesn't leak only things that could be argued as whstleblowing--he leaks whatever he thinks he has to to hurt the US. Just by chance, sooner or later he'll leak something that's actually good to leak, but it no more makes his leaks good when when Microsoft cheats the bank fraudster.
Any geek with actual cred would know that the movie was an adaptation of the John Campbell Jr. story "Who Goes There" and that Carpenter's version was much more faithful an adaptation than the original, actually using the original premise of a shapeshifting monster and even keeping the blood test. If it was a ripoff of the 1951 version, why did it put back all the things that weren't in the 1951 version?
If you RTFA it points out that Red Hat and Eben Moglen claimed that paying the money was compatible with the GPL, yet also told the European Commission that only royalty-free standards are compatible with the GPL. Which contradicts themselves.
Actually, putting up photos of torturers has ethical problems that are just as bad, Saying "this guy is a torturer" and spreading it around the world is like saying "this guy is a terrorist" or "this guy is a pedophile" and spreading it around the world. It's not as if Flickr has any reason to trust a random guy off the street accusing a third party of a serious crime.
If I posted a picture of you and said "my neighbor is a terrorist", shouldn't you hope that Flickr would remove it?
(And if you say, well, these guys really are torturers, but you aren't really a terrorist, tell me how Flickr is supposed to know that?)
By treating Johnny as a slighted traumatized victim before he himself has had a chance to reconcile the situation is what is getting us into this sheep culture to begin with.
Whether someone is bleeding and bruised really isn't affected very much by whether they can "reconcile the situation".
The article is really an anti-Republican hack job that 1) selectively picks anti-science activity by Republicans and 2) tries to associate it with more Republicans and with the Tea Party when even that is unwarranted.
The need for payment is being tied to the acts of people, so it's legitimate to point out that some people do not perform such acts. If the Iraq war costs had been imposed on the public under the grounds that a few million Americans had helped put Saddam Hussein in power and that the government could arrest millions of "terrorists" but instead charged everyone a "supporting terrorism fine" as a compromise, you'd have a closer analogy.
I can't for the life of me figure out why this merits a Slashdot story. Even if you conclude "Slashdot readers are geeks, geeks have comic book collections" it's pretty unlikely that many Slashdot readers use their collections to launder drug money.
That doesn't work even if it's actually a reasonable patent. What if the research cost is $50000, but the research only has a 5% chance of producing something useful and the company had to do twenty such research projects in order to get one patent? Certainly not every anti-cancer research project is going to produce a cure for cancer, after all--a lot of them won't pan out.
That's not what "clearing the neighborhood" is defined as. "Clearing the neighborhood" contains an exemption for other objects under the first object's gravitational influence.
If there are two objects in one orbit *and* the objects stay that way because of some complicated gravitational interaction, they are exempt from "clearing the neighborhood" and can still count as planets. In order to not count as planets you'd have to have two objects in the same orbit that just stay there because they happen to be in the same orbit, without any gravitational forces keeping it that way.
It's highly likely that these two objects are staying in that orbit because of gravitational interactions, and therefore they are probably planets.
Or they would be, except that the definition of "planet" used to disqualify Pluto specifically says it only applies to our own solar system. It couldn't be applied to other systems anyway, since we can't see enough smaller objects in other solar systems to know whether the neighborhood has been cleared or not. Currently, the definition used outside the solar system has problems at its lower size limits.
What if the other person has compromised rationality and/or skewed priorities and interests. If they are unwilling or unable to act rationally, or they have disordered interests, is it better to act "morally correct" and unecessarily put the lives of your men at risk, or manipulate their compromised rationality in order to secure the optimal outcome for the men on the front lines?
Saying "it's okay as long as the other person has skewed priorities and ionterests" is equivalent to saying "it's okay whenever you want". Everyone thinks the other side has skewed priorities and interests.
I don't get it. That's a peculiar turn of phrase. Is there some point which is not in the "civilized world" which you are concerned about?
(And if you're a European using the phrase to imply that the USA is not civilized, which 95% of uses of that phrase seem to be, the US does indeed have such laws.)
Attacking Wikileaks this way is perfectly legitimate. If Assange was lobbing missiles at us from his home country, we would be justified in attacking him or even killing him--even though lobbing missiles at us is perfectly legal where he is standing. It's often legal in country A to fight country B; this does not mean that country B isn't allowed to do anything to the person in country A.
Right now he's in the position of the guy lobbing missiles. Don't think "he's just releasing documents, that's nonviolent, we shouldn't do anything to him because he's nonviolent". Lots of successful spying is nonviolent, but spies can legitimately get shot.
Of course it's "unfair" to Assange, but war is not about playing fair. He gets himself involved in a cyberwar, he should expect to get cyberdestroyed. If he doesn't like it, then he shouldn't fight a war in the first place.
I can think of a lot of examples where someone was ignored, laughed at, fought, and they lost. I've never been a believer in Godwin's Law, so the most obvious example I can point out is Hitler. If you want to limit it to ideas, most examples are by definition going to be ones you never heard of (since if you heard of it, it probably won), but I haven't heard much about the Arian Heresy recently.
Overstating the influence? The problem is that articles are created based on references, not "influence" and references as an indication of influence just doesn't make sense for MUDs or many other Internet-based phenomena. There are plenty of things which have about as much influence as MUDs but which get articles simply because they have more references.
30% of a year is 3.6 months. The older developer can learn the technology in that period of time, at which point he will know the new technology and will also have more skills than the younger developer in anything else.
So they could justify paying him the salary of the younger employer, minus 30%, plus some percentage for extra skills, and only for the first year. After that, pay him a salary equal to the younger developer's plus more for the extra skills.
Paying him 30% less, with no accounting for extra skills at all, and for all years forever, forever, can't be justified.
There are two reasons this doesn't happen. The first is that management and HR are generally completely incapable of understanding how long it takes to learn a new technology. The main reason is that they like to skimp on salaries and it's a lot easier to skimp by not giving an already employed person a 30% raise than by hiring a new person for 30% less--they're far more likely to go somewhere else when doing so just means picking a better offer than when it means quitting.
I'd argue that while an individual invading the privacy of a political figure isn't worse than the reverse situation (a political figure invading the privacy of an individual), it *is* worse than an individual invading the privacy of another private individual. Invading the privacy of a political figure doesn't just hurt the person whose privacy you invaded; it helps destroy the democratic process.
That's not completely the fault of the customer, it's the fault of greedy companies just like the ones we're discussing. Shops have a habit of telling the customer they need things they don't really need, and/or trying to sell expensive items when the cheap one is just as good. The customer has no way to know that this time around he really does need all those other parts and really wouldn't be better off with the cheap tires, since he has no way to know that the shop is telling the truth this time instead of lying and upselling.
"Defendant" refers to two different entities here. There's the defendant who posted the material to Ripoff Report (who was sued in the original case), and there's Ripoff Report as the defendant in this case. What happened is that the (first) defendant lost his case and was told to remove the content, and when he didn't, Ripoff Report was sued to try to make them remove it instead.
Just because they are releasing it in pieces doesn't mean they are "holding back" in any relevant sense. They don't hold things back out of a belief that some of them cause more harm than others and the ones that cause more harm should not be released. "Holding back" a bunch of random items that are no different from the others, just because you don't want to release it in one lump, doesn't count.
The Associated Press count was something over 100K, and North Korea starved up to 2 million, so you're wrong. Even the exaggerated figures from the ORB poll don't go anywhere near 2 million. And no, people don't starve in North Korea because of export controls; North Korea itself is a closed society and it did that to itself.
Slashdot Mirror
We all know that Microsoft is unethical (despite receiving an ethics award). I'm sure that at some point, Microsoft has happened to do some good by cheating someone--maybe they drove a company out of business but unknown to them if the company had survived it would have committed bank fraud.
That doesn't make cheating people into a good thing. It just means that if you keep on doing lots of damage sooner or later by pure chance you'll hit a target that deserves it. Assange doesn't leak only things that could be argued as whstleblowing--he leaks whatever he thinks he has to to hurt the US. Just by chance, sooner or later he'll leak something that's actually good to leak, but it no more makes his leaks good when when Microsoft cheats the bank fraudster.
Any geek with actual cred would know that the movie was an adaptation of the John Campbell Jr. story "Who Goes There" and that Carpenter's version was much more faithful an adaptation than the original, actually using the original premise of a shapeshifting monster and even keeping the blood test. If it was a ripoff of the 1951 version, why did it put back all the things that weren't in the 1951 version?
So what are you doing reading a list of "most ethical" companies then?
If you RTFA it points out that Red Hat and Eben Moglen claimed that paying the money was compatible with the GPL, yet also told the European Commission that only royalty-free standards are compatible with the GPL. Which contradicts themselves.
Actually, putting up photos of torturers has ethical problems that are just as bad, Saying "this guy is a torturer" and spreading it around the world is like saying "this guy is a terrorist" or "this guy is a pedophile" and spreading it around the world. It's not as if Flickr has any reason to trust a random guy off the street accusing a third party of a serious crime.
If I posted a picture of you and said "my neighbor is a terrorist", shouldn't you hope that Flickr would remove it?
(And if you say, well, these guys really are torturers, but you aren't really a terrorist, tell me how Flickr is supposed to know that?)
By treating Johnny as a slighted traumatized victim before he himself has had a chance to reconcile the situation is what is getting us into this sheep culture to begin with.
Whether someone is bleeding and bruised really isn't affected very much by whether they can "reconcile the situation".
"Let's agree not to call this a "Republican" or "Democratic" position."
You can agree. The New York Times won't. (Remember how the Obama administration misrepresented scientists in order to get the ban on deep water drilling?)
The article is really an anti-Republican hack job that 1) selectively picks anti-science activity by Republicans and 2) tries to associate it with more Republicans and with the Tea Party when even that is unwarranted.
The need for payment is being tied to the acts of people, so it's legitimate to point out that some people do not perform such acts. If the Iraq war costs had been imposed on the public under the grounds that a few million Americans had helped put Saddam Hussein in power and that the government could arrest millions of "terrorists" but instead charged everyone a "supporting terrorism fine" as a compromise, you'd have a closer analogy.
I can't for the life of me figure out why this merits a Slashdot story. Even if you conclude "Slashdot readers are geeks, geeks have comic book collections" it's pretty unlikely that many Slashdot readers use their collections to launder drug money.
That doesn't work even if it's actually a reasonable patent. What if the research cost is $50000, but the research only has a 5% chance of producing something useful and the company had to do twenty such research projects in order to get one patent? Certainly not every anti-cancer research project is going to produce a cure for cancer, after all--a lot of them won't pan out.
That's not what "clearing the neighborhood" is defined as. "Clearing the neighborhood" contains an exemption for other objects under the first object's gravitational influence.
If there are two objects in one orbit *and* the objects stay that way because of some complicated gravitational interaction, they are exempt from "clearing the neighborhood" and can still count as planets. In order to not count as planets you'd have to have two objects in the same orbit that just stay there because they happen to be in the same orbit, without any gravitational forces keeping it that way.
It's highly likely that these two objects are staying in that orbit because of gravitational interactions, and therefore they are probably planets.
Or they would be, except that the definition of "planet" used to disqualify Pluto specifically says it only applies to our own solar system. It couldn't be applied to other systems anyway, since we can't see enough smaller objects in other solar systems to know whether the neighborhood has been cleared or not. Currently, the definition used outside the solar system has problems at its lower size limits.
What if the other person has compromised rationality and/or skewed priorities and interests. If they are unwilling or unable to act rationally, or they have disordered interests, is it better to act "morally correct" and unecessarily put the lives of your men at risk, or manipulate their compromised rationality in order to secure the optimal outcome for the men on the front lines?
Saying "it's okay as long as the other person has skewed priorities and ionterests" is equivalent to saying "it's okay whenever you want". Everyone thinks the other side has skewed priorities and interests.
I don't get it. That's a peculiar turn of phrase. Is there some point which is not in the "civilized world" which you are concerned about?
(And if you're a European using the phrase to imply that the USA is not civilized, which 95% of uses of that phrase seem to be, the US does indeed have such laws.)
You *are* aware that this is about a *government job*, aren't you? No corporation is involved here.
Attacking Wikileaks this way is perfectly legitimate. If Assange was lobbing missiles at us from his home country, we would be justified in attacking him or even killing him--even though lobbing missiles at us is perfectly legal where he is standing. It's often legal in country A to fight country B; this does not mean that country B isn't allowed to do anything to the person in country A.
Right now he's in the position of the guy lobbing missiles. Don't think "he's just releasing documents, that's nonviolent, we shouldn't do anything to him because he's nonviolent". Lots of successful spying is nonviolent, but spies can legitimately get shot.
Of course it's "unfair" to Assange, but war is not about playing fair. He gets himself involved in a cyberwar, he should expect to get cyberdestroyed. If he doesn't like it, then he shouldn't fight a war in the first place.
I can think of a lot of examples where someone was ignored, laughed at, fought, and they lost. I've never been a believer in Godwin's Law, so the most obvious example I can point out is Hitler. If you want to limit it to ideas, most examples are by definition going to be ones you never heard of (since if you heard of it, it probably won), but I haven't heard much about the Arian Heresy recently.
Violent protest is not an act whose legality requires a lawyer to determine.
Overstating the influence? The problem is that articles are created based on references, not "influence" and references as an indication of influence just doesn't make sense for MUDs or many other Internet-based phenomena. There are plenty of things which have about as much influence as MUDs but which get articles simply because they have more references.
30% of a year is 3.6 months. The older developer can learn the technology in that period of time, at which point he will know the new technology and will also have more skills than the younger developer in anything else.
So they could justify paying him the salary of the younger employer, minus 30%, plus some percentage for extra skills, and only for the first year. After that, pay him a salary equal to the younger developer's plus more for the extra skills.
Paying him 30% less, with no accounting for extra skills at all, and for all years forever, forever, can't be justified.
There are two reasons this doesn't happen. The first is that management and HR are generally completely incapable of understanding how long it takes to learn a new technology. The main reason is that they like to skimp on salaries and it's a lot easier to skimp by not giving an already employed person a 30% raise than by hiring a new person for 30% less--they're far more likely to go somewhere else when doing so just means picking a better offer than when it means quitting.
I'd argue that while an individual invading the privacy of a political figure isn't worse than the reverse situation (a political figure invading the privacy of an individual), it *is* worse than an individual invading the privacy of another private individual. Invading the privacy of a political figure doesn't just hurt the person whose privacy you invaded; it helps destroy the democratic process.
That's not completely the fault of the customer, it's the fault of greedy companies just like the ones we're discussing. Shops have a habit of telling the customer they need things they don't really need, and/or trying to sell expensive items when the cheap one is just as good. The customer has no way to know that this time around he really does need all those other parts and really wouldn't be better off with the cheap tires, since he has no way to know that the shop is telling the truth this time instead of lying and upselling.
What makes you think this is being done to appease the religious rather than to appease feminists?
The actual article is a confusing mess too.
"Defendant" refers to two different entities here. There's the defendant who posted the material to Ripoff Report (who was sued in the original case), and there's Ripoff Report as the defendant in this case. What happened is that the (first) defendant lost his case and was told to remove the content, and when he didn't, Ripoff Report was sued to try to make them remove it instead.
Just because they are releasing it in pieces doesn't mean they are "holding back" in any relevant sense. They don't hold things back out of a belief that some of them cause more harm than others and the ones that cause more harm should not be released. "Holding back" a bunch of random items that are no different from the others, just because you don't want to release it in one lump, doesn't count.
The Associated Press count was something over 100K, and North Korea starved up to 2 million, so you're wrong. Even the exaggerated figures from the ORB poll don't go anywhere near 2 million. And no, people don't starve in North Korea because of export controls; North Korea itself is a closed society and it did that to itself.