I'm astonished that so many posts here think this story is funny, or that this guy (and wife) got what he deserved. This is the saddest story I've read in a while. Of all the lassaiz-faire, libertarian-style thought that flows around on Slashdot, this "stupid people deserve to lose all their money" attitude is the most chilling. I mean, come on, that's the exact same justification made by con men and scammers themselves.
There are people in the world that cannot take care of themselves. Some are retarded or suffer from psychosis or other mental problems. Some suffer from incurable illnesses. Some are too young or too old. Some are disabled and unable to work. And some are just not smart, that is, stupid.
Which of these categories deserve to be broke and homeless? Which of these should we kick to the curb without any assistance or fallback support? Which of these can we laugh at because they're scared about where they're going to be able to sleep or feed their freaking dog?
It says this -- "[1] Object or binary code is the code computers use and appears as a series of is and Os."
Now that's funny. Here's a computer software company thinks that binary code is composed of the letters "i" and "O". Say, here can I buy more of their products?
Or rather -- has it failed to occur to anyone that by patenting an anti-anti-spam technique, AT&T can legally forbid spammers from using that technique?
I mean, that is what the "not clear what AT&T will use it for" part of the banner was implying.
The follow-up thought should be: How many times has a big company done something rational and charitable like that? Not much. AT&T is already in the business of playing pro-caller-ID anti-caller-ID services off each other.
Now that's ridiculous. No other amendment so clearly, explicitly lays out the reasons for its own existence -- that is, for a "well-organized militia". Any reading which blocks out that fact can only be due to the whacked-out hallucinatory right-propaganda which has taken hold in this country.
War? believes that what we are doing is legal; though we see it as an issue of electronic civil disobedience we believe it is Diebold which is abusing copyright law in an attempt to shut down free speech and the democratic process.
Okay, now it's either legal OR it's civil disobedience (i.e., intentionally breaking a law, and accepting an unjust punishment, to draw attention to an issue). As someone who supports this effort -- someone who's done a little political action and gets steaming mad at scatterbrained hippies who drag down liberal progressive movements -- I'd prefer that they straighten out the claims of their action.
I think it would be preferable to claim that Diebold's cease-and-desist order is illegal and unenforceable. Then, keeping the memos online is even better than civil disobedience (noble in its own right), it's actually civil obedience for a just cause.
He failed to name how the capacity should be described, though.
Well, he does say this:
...because 1024 (a true kilobyte) is definitely not equal to 1000.
And this:
The author has recently heard about a naming convention that will attempt to clarify these terms, including confusion on kilobytes, etc.
But personally I strongly reject this "kibibytes" attempt at CS revisionist history. Stick with what CS people have been using as measurements for decades, I say, and not submit to what the drive manufacturers want to use for inflated advertising.
Now I wonder why I never saw this mentioned in American articles. Is this because Americans don't think it matters? Is this because, while they know it might matter, they want to keep that out of the discussion? Is it an unwritten rule that religion is kept out of controversal discussions? Even when analyzing personalities? Or is it just not widely known that he is Mormon? Or is it, to the contrary, just implicitly assumed by US readers that a person such as McBride is probably strongly religious?
An excellent good question, which as an American with a significant other from Europe, after a day of reflection, I'll take a stab at.
Americans are pretty prone to bring up God in a completely generic, vanilla sense. "God helped through this hard time/ crisis/ career" and so forth. That's done commonly in public, political, and sporting life, and is basically accepted without much notice.
However, specific religions, faiths, or doctrines are almost never referred to, and it would be rather jarring to hear them mentioned. It probably would be considered distasteful and bigoted to evaluate someone's personality based on their particular church.
This fits in a lot of ways in American society. (1) Americans are very religious, and generally assume everyone believes in a personal God. (2) We have a huge variety of churches, constitutionally cannot have an official religion, and therefore need to carry on civil society without sparking endless interfaith conflicts. (3) We're generally much less educated about religious history than Europeans -- separation of church state means religious education classes are prohibited, for example. Most people won't know the specific teachings of the church they (occasionally) attend, never mind other churches. Very few outsiders would know enough about Mormon doctrines to have any reaction at all if they were informed about a particular member.
Don't like 'big business'? Think everybody should have equal paying jobs? Read up on Marxism and it's success this past century. If you still think 'free enterprise sucks' then at least be logical and apply that belief to your life- move to Cuba.
Ah, yes, the old "don't like it, move to Cuba [Russia/China]" argument. The argument involving only two extremes is a false dichotomy.
There are alternatives between the excesses of American anything-goes capitalism and Stalinist tyrannical communism. In fact, most developed countries have a very reasonable balance between market forces and social welfare: Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, etc., etc. Seems to work pretty well for their citizens, providing everyone with health care and finite work weeks and all that.
If that were the case, you'd think that the RIAA would have a hard time finding bands willing to sign contracts... I have to conclude that either your facts aren't entirely true, or aren't entirely complete. Afterall, SOMETHING is driving these bands to aspire for a big contract, and it's not poverty.
Holy smoke, this situation has been documented in so many places over the past few years. The answer to your paradox is easy: young kids in bands are really stupid! They have no idea what the money or contractual situation is, and they are easily taken advantage of.
Here's a link to a piece written back in 1993. It's by Steve Albini, a record producer who produced Nirvana's "In Utero" albulm. He explains in detail both the accounting numbers and the tragic vulnerability of newly discovered bands. Just read the first paragraph where he gives his impression of new bands about to sign a recording deal -- it's a killer.
...it's obvious that people act to further their own interests. And in fact, the science of economics is founded on this observation. So everyone should be a rational economizer, busy calculating their individual costs and benefits...
Without commenting on the broader review, this right here is the most flagrantly incorrect assumption in possibly any field of theory. It's amazing that capitalist theory can be predicated on this "rational actor" postulate, when it barely resembles reality at all. Of course, it's insidious because it flatters the consuming public by attributing generally intelligent behavior to it.
If individual economic actors are rational, then what's the Christmas buying season all about? How does half of the entire year's economic activity occur in December as part of exchanging mostly useless cruft to everyone anyone knows, in consideration of a Santa Claus-faced myth?
The "rational actor" economic presumption amuses me greatly.
This is really an amazing thread, because half of the posts seem to be really strident calls for use of this "kibibyte" terminology that I've never heard of before.
I teach CS in a community college and I've got a whole bookshelf here of CS books and not one of them has any reference to this "kibi" notation. My Webster's New World Dictionary (c) 1988 defines "kilobyte n. 1. a unit of capacity, equal to 1,024 (2^10) bytes 2. loosely, one thousand bytes". Webopedia lists kilobyte as meaning 2^10, and has no entry for "kibibyte". Link.
This "kibibyte" notation is really very nonstandard and it's astonishing to see people incensed over the decades-old practice of "kilobyte = 1024 bytes".
Frankly, I smell blood for the first time in this epic. SCO's position is weakening and the Open Source community seems to be disproving all their arguments within hours of an SCO press release. The fact that McBride has awoken and thinks he needs to address the Open Source community for the first time says he's really getting beaten up.
Yet he still doesn't get it, and I can see more openings by which he'll be receiving the next few punches. His whole pose is based on a belief that Open Source must be basically another company that can be sucked into negotiations with lawyers and fat cats over a business table. This is most transparent right at the end of the letter:
A sustainable business model for software development can be built only on an intellectual property foundation... the SCO Group is open to ideas of working with the Open Source community to monetize software technology... It is easier for some in the Open Source community to fire off a "rant" than to sit across a negotiation table.
So what if Open Source contributors are fundamentally not interested in software business development, happy to volunteer time for free, and would prefer that communities, governments, schools, and charities have free and open tools to make themselves better?
Then, SCO's chief Darl McBride has demonstrated that he has no strategic plan whatsoever.
The article poinpoints a problem that I have absolutely been worried about for some time now -- that fact that robots, automation, will turn a large sector of employees out of their jobs and radically increase the concentration of wealth in our nation.
The sci-fi hope for new technologies has always been that it will "relieve humans of dreary jobs and increase leisure time". However, this has not turned out to be the case, and frankly it cannot, because the people who buy the technology (robot) will simply do without another worker after that point -- no businessman is going to pay a salary for work that someone isn't doing.
In different language, this has been talked about for quite a long time. Modernized business has "centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands" as one text put it in 1848 (namely, the Communist Manifesto). In truth, I've long thought that the Marxist criticism of capitalism is right on target -- even if the solutions it proposed were almost entirely unworkable.
In very much the same way, I find myself agreeing with the linked article's criticisms (robots will permanently displace masses of workers), and find its proposed solutions pretty much totally impossible.
(1) I agree that a big concentration of wealth is a bad thing for our society, but frankly I don't think most people are actually bothered by that very much at all. I think it's too abstract an issue for much political interest these days. (Is there much difference to the average voter nowadays if CEOs earn millions of dollars, or tens-of-millions of dollars? Any difference if the richest quintile own 40% or 60% of assets?)
(2) I don't think there's any way the U.S. public would accept cutting every citizen a check for $25,000 per year, or any amount. Our culture is adamant that pay without work is immoral. Right-wing rhetoric has really been precisely fine-tuned over the years to make any possibility of payments like that, or even discussion about it, sound totally absurd. The political environment today is marching directly away from social-program-type funding, not closer to it.
(3) I'm cynical enough to even be a bit skeptical that global income payments would be beneficial, psychologically, to the majority of people. As an example, most lottery winners wind up with ruined finances and marriages. The single anecdote of "Harry Potter" being the product of a welfare mother cannot be extrapolated to a universal creative renaissance. (I can't remember which SF book took it as a possibility, some Stephenson or Gibson novel, but I was skeptical of that when I first read it.) As someone else pointed out, government payments on this magnitude would also probably create skyrocketing inflation (much like college tuition).
(4) The possibilities of funding a global payment are, at best, just tricks to make an expanded social benefit not look like it. You can't disassociate checks to every citizen from money taken in by the government, as the article tries to argue. (a) Advertising on every dollar bill, road surface, and public space? Bleagh! (That's his #1 idea.) (b) What most resemble his "extreme income taxes" (like big inheritances) are right now being rolled back to zero in the U.S. (c) Lotteries, fines, and auctions are notorious for being sucked in to the general budget even when "earmarked" for specific expenses. (d) The most likely example is the Alaskan oil-payment fund, but I would think that too could evaporate as soon as some political interest wants it used for a different purpose, especially on a national stage.
(5) To complicate matters, I agree that lower-class service jobs can be automated, and that middle-class technical jobs can be outsourced offshore. However, I see no compelling argument that classic "esteemed" jobs like doctors and lawyers can be downsized in the same fashion.
So in conclusion, I totally agree that increased automation of service-sector jobs will work to increase unemployment and lower wages -- robots will no
And what you said doesnt make any sense, you act like a person must get a B in every single class they ever took in college, we all know that this is very unlikely as most people are humans who have strengths and weaknesses.
Actually, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think you'll find that most people going to Harvard did in fact get A's in all their prior courses, regardless of their major. Probably so too while they're at college.
Okay, I'm going to overlook the fact that the primary poster of the thread is pursuing personal edification, and not a particular educational track, so the fact that grades are given doesn't seem to be a relevant concern in his case.
Let me see if I can be helpful in this sub-thread. I'm an adjunct faculty member at a community college, I've taught for going on two years now. I'll speculate that I'm teaching in the same region you're going to school, based on the 4-year institutions you're looking at.
If I could give one crucial insight to my students, that I usually have to bite my tongue on, it's this. 4-year schools have expectations which are an order of magnitude beyond those of 2-year community colleges. My biggest challenge in teaching now is to take my experiences at a 4-year (state) school and dial them way down to a level where my students can pass the course, with some getting A's. Maybe my two best students in a class of 20 seem to be doing work that would be appropriate at a 4-year school.
I would encourage you to not shy away from any courses at a community college. The hardest class in your school will be just a taste of what you'll be asked to do at any 4-year school. You need to find this out about yourself, if you can function at this level, sooner rather than later. If you're worried about passing a math course at a community college, the honest truth is, Harvard is not in the cards. My guess is that a school like Harvard is not going to distinguish much past "4.0 or not 4.0?" when looking at a GPA from a community college.
Not to say that other colleges you mention are not a possibility. I write quite a few recommendations for my students to go to Northeastern and BU, but even those are generally just my "A" students.
Did you read the article? This had nothing to do with patents or copyrights...
Actually, that's not true. If you read the actual judgement here , you'll find that the strongest argument centered around patents, in the following vein:
(1) Google claimed its rankings were opinion and thus protected by the First Amendment. (2) Search King claimed that they couldn't be opinions precisely because Google holds a patent on the process used to make them. (3) The judge found Search King's argument "not wholly without merit" (p. 6), but that Google could still alter the result of that patented process in a subjective manner and thus it was protected as free speech.
The critical argument by Search King (p. 5):
First, Search King notes that Lawrence Page ("Page"), the founder of Google and the inventor of the PageRank system, holds a U.S. patent on the system. Search King argues that... because patented products or processes must be replicable... the PageRank system must be objective in nature, and therefore capable of being proven true or false.
The EE times has a report on this teleconference here.
McBride countered that Novell is wrong about the patent and copyright issues, but added that "none of SCO's enforcement actions have been based on copyrights or patents, anyway."
The company said that its enforcement actions have been based on the contract rights that flow from its 30,000 Unix system licensees, not from patents.
Hmmm. There's a contradiction in there regarding the threat to sue Linus for patent violations, I think.
Writing viruses was actually covered in the assembly language class I took at UMaine circa 1992, in the last chapter of the instructor-written textbook. The rationale in that case was that in informing CS students how easy it is to write viruses, they would no longer see them as technically impressive and therefore not be interested in pursuing their creation. (I just taught my first assembly class this past semester, and use this as an anecdote without actually covering it myself.)
Since I have the text right here, I'll quote it: "...you do not have to be a genius to write a virus... Some people use virus writing to prove their programming skill, but this is poor proof of such skill in my opinion. It's about as much proof of genius as throwing a brick through a window."
From the article: "For a research investment to be justified, it must produce value equal to or greater than that of the investment."
I find this extremely questionable. History is full of scientific discoveries and ideas which were not able to produce equal or greater value for long time. Can anyone enlighten me about the value produced by Einstein's research?
Einstein's most important results had no research investment funding it whatsoever. Hence, it does not serve as a counterexample to an assertion about "research investment".
The best that occurs to me, aside from lobbying Congress (ha!), is to boycott the companies, declaring we want fair use back. It's the oldest rule of capitalism: Vote with your feet. If imposing copy protection schemes results in making less money, the industry realize its error a heck of a lot faster than any amount of criticism or lawbreaking. (They'd rather be rich if unpopular.)
When exactly did this ever work? No one ever secured civil rights by engaging capitalism -- at best, you get differently-branded product.
The only way to secure civil rights of any sort is through legislation, by engaging the political process (which occasionally has included revolution). If we think that capitalism can ever rationally solve problems like these, then "the terrorists have already won".
The other respondents, frankly, have it right. Not to be belligerent, but your attitude represents everything that would give me a splitting headache when I worked in industry. (I teach now instead.)
It's not the office workers' job to manage data-migration, nor should it be... nor is it their job to test phone lines, set up cube walls, replace the lighting fixtures, or perform OSHA inspections on their workplace.
You're all pissy because management won't accede to turning off all the used office applications from the server? Maybe you should bring in a dog and kick it in the middle of your presentation, that'll make your point even better.
This is one the best essays on software engineering I've read in a while. As a programmer and CS educator, it's really served to crystallize for me why (a) it seems so much harder for students to learn programming these days, and (b) why I've grown unhappy over the years with the series of new engineering paradigms that are in use. Extremely helpful for putting my own thoughts in order.
The law statement itself, "all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky" may possibly get included in my personal "top 10" aphorisms manifesto.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm astonished that so many posts here think this story is funny, or that this guy (and wife) got what he deserved. This is the saddest story I've read in a while. Of all the lassaiz-faire, libertarian-style thought that flows around on Slashdot, this "stupid people deserve to lose all their money" attitude is the most chilling. I mean, come on, that's the exact same justification made by con men and scammers themselves.
There are people in the world that cannot take care of themselves. Some are retarded or suffer from psychosis or other mental problems. Some suffer from incurable illnesses. Some are too young or too old. Some are disabled and unable to work. And some are just not smart, that is, stupid.
Which of these categories deserve to be broke and homeless? Which of these should we kick to the curb without any assistance or fallback support? Which of these can we laugh at because they're scared about where they're going to be able to sleep or feed their freaking dog?
Tough for me to say that about any of them.
This post has been modded -1 for having a pro-Bush, anti-terror perspective.
Or rather:
This post has been modded -1 for having a contradiction.
It says this --
"[1] Object or binary code is the code computers use and appears as a series of is and Os."
Now that's funny. Here's a computer software company thinks that binary code is composed of the letters "i" and "O". Say, here can I buy more of their products?
Or rather -- has it failed to occur to anyone that by patenting an anti-anti-spam technique, AT&T can legally forbid spammers from using that technique?
I mean, that is what the "not clear what AT&T will use it for" part of the banner was implying.
The follow-up thought should be: How many times has a big company done something rational and charitable like that? Not much. AT&T is already in the business of playing pro-caller-ID anti-caller-ID services off each other.
Now that's ridiculous. No other amendment so clearly, explicitly lays out the reasons for its own existence -- that is, for a "well-organized militia". Any reading which blocks out that fact can only be due to the whacked-out hallucinatory right-propaganda which has taken hold in this country.
From the link...
War? believes that what we are doing is legal; though we see it as an issue of electronic civil disobedience we believe it is Diebold which is abusing copyright law in an attempt to shut down free speech and the democratic process.
Okay, now it's either legal OR it's civil disobedience (i.e., intentionally breaking a law, and accepting an unjust punishment, to draw attention to an issue). As someone who supports this effort -- someone who's done a little political action and gets steaming mad at scatterbrained hippies who drag down liberal progressive movements -- I'd prefer that they straighten out the claims of their action.
I think it would be preferable to claim that Diebold's cease-and-desist order is illegal and unenforceable. Then, keeping the memos online is even better than civil disobedience (noble in its own right), it's actually civil obedience for a just cause.
Well, he does say this:
And this:
But personally I strongly reject this "kibibytes" attempt at CS revisionist history. Stick with what CS people have been using as measurements for decades, I say, and not submit to what the drive manufacturers want to use for inflated advertising.
Now I wonder why I never saw this mentioned in American articles. Is this because Americans don't think it matters? Is this because, while they know it might matter, they want to keep that out of the discussion? Is it an unwritten rule that religion is kept out of controversal discussions? Even when analyzing personalities? Or is it just not widely known that he is Mormon? Or is it, to the contrary, just implicitly assumed by US readers that a person such as McBride is probably strongly religious?
An excellent good question, which as an American with a significant other from Europe, after a day of reflection, I'll take a stab at.
Americans are pretty prone to bring up God in a completely generic, vanilla sense. "God helped through this hard time/ crisis/ career" and so forth. That's done commonly in public, political, and sporting life, and is basically accepted without much notice.
However, specific religions, faiths, or doctrines are almost never referred to, and it would be rather jarring to hear them mentioned. It probably would be considered distasteful and bigoted to evaluate someone's personality based on their particular church.
This fits in a lot of ways in American society. (1) Americans are very religious, and generally assume everyone believes in a personal God. (2) We have a huge variety of churches, constitutionally cannot have an official religion, and therefore need to carry on civil society without sparking endless interfaith conflicts. (3) We're generally much less educated about religious history than Europeans -- separation of church state means religious education classes are prohibited, for example. Most people won't know the specific teachings of the church they (occasionally) attend, never mind other churches. Very few outsiders would know enough about Mormon doctrines to have any reaction at all if they were informed about a particular member.
Hope that's partially helpful.
Don't like 'big business'? Think everybody should have equal paying jobs? Read up on Marxism and it's success this past century. If you still think 'free enterprise sucks' then at least be logical and apply that belief to your life- move to Cuba.
Ah, yes, the old "don't like it, move to Cuba [Russia/China]" argument. The argument involving only two extremes is a false dichotomy.
There are alternatives between the excesses of American anything-goes capitalism and Stalinist tyrannical communism. In fact, most developed countries have a very reasonable balance between market forces and social welfare: Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, etc., etc. Seems to work pretty well for their citizens, providing everyone with health care and finite work weeks and all that.
Noone wanted to talk about it. My assumption is that noone I got to wanted to rock the boat, and noone responsible trusted the employees.
"Noone" is not a word. The phrase "no one", however, is proper usage.
If that were the case, you'd think that the RIAA would have a hard time finding bands willing to sign contracts... I have to conclude that either your facts aren't entirely true, or aren't entirely complete. Afterall, SOMETHING is driving these bands to aspire for a big contract, and it's not poverty.
Holy smoke, this situation has been documented in so many places over the past few years. The answer to your paradox is easy: young kids in bands are really stupid! They have no idea what the money or contractual situation is, and they are easily taken advantage of.
Here's a link to a piece written back in 1993. It's by Steve Albini, a record producer who produced Nirvana's "In Utero" albulm. He explains in detail both the accounting numbers and the tragic vulnerability of newly discovered bands. Just read the first paragraph where he gives his impression of new bands about to sign a recording deal -- it's a killer.
...it's obvious that people act to further their own interests. And in fact, the science of economics is founded on this observation. So everyone should be a rational economizer, busy calculating their individual costs and benefits...
Without commenting on the broader review, this right here is the most flagrantly incorrect assumption in possibly any field of theory. It's amazing that capitalist theory can be predicated on this "rational actor" postulate, when it barely resembles reality at all. Of course, it's insidious because it flatters the consuming public by attributing generally intelligent behavior to it.
If individual economic actors are rational, then what's the Christmas buying season all about? How does half of the entire year's economic activity occur in December as part of exchanging mostly useless cruft to everyone anyone knows, in consideration of a Santa Claus-faced myth?
The "rational actor" economic presumption amuses me greatly.
This is really an amazing thread, because half of the posts seem to be really strident calls for use of this "kibibyte" terminology that I've never heard of before.
I teach CS in a community college and I've got a whole bookshelf here of CS books and not one of them has any reference to this "kibi" notation. My Webster's New World Dictionary (c) 1988 defines "kilobyte n. 1. a unit of capacity, equal to 1,024 (2^10) bytes 2. loosely, one thousand bytes". Webopedia lists kilobyte as meaning 2^10, and has no entry for "kibibyte". Link.
This "kibibyte" notation is really very nonstandard and it's astonishing to see people incensed over the decades-old practice of "kilobyte = 1024 bytes".
Frankly, I smell blood for the first time in this epic. SCO's position is weakening and the Open Source community seems to be disproving all their arguments within hours of an SCO press release. The fact that McBride has awoken and thinks he needs to address the Open Source community for the first time says he's really getting beaten up.
Yet he still doesn't get it, and I can see more openings by which he'll be receiving the next few punches. His whole pose is based on a belief that Open Source must be basically another company that can be sucked into negotiations with lawyers and fat cats over a business table. This is most transparent right at the end of the letter:
A sustainable business model for software development can be built only on an intellectual property foundation... the SCO Group is open to ideas of working with the Open Source community to monetize software technology... It is easier for some in the Open Source community to fire off a "rant" than to sit across a negotiation table.
So what if Open Source contributors are fundamentally not interested in software business development, happy to volunteer time for free, and would prefer that communities, governments, schools, and charities have free and open tools to make themselves better?
Then, SCO's chief Darl McBride has demonstrated that he has no strategic plan whatsoever.
The article poinpoints a problem that I have absolutely been worried about for some time now -- that fact that robots, automation, will turn a large sector of employees out of their jobs and radically increase the concentration of wealth in our nation.
The sci-fi hope for new technologies has always been that it will "relieve humans of dreary jobs and increase leisure time". However, this has not turned out to be the case, and frankly it cannot, because the people who buy the technology (robot) will simply do without another worker after that point -- no businessman is going to pay a salary for work that someone isn't doing.
In different language, this has been talked about for quite a long time. Modernized business has "centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands" as one text put it in 1848 (namely, the Communist Manifesto). In truth, I've long thought that the Marxist criticism of capitalism is right on target -- even if the solutions it proposed were almost entirely unworkable.
In very much the same way, I find myself agreeing with the linked article's criticisms (robots will permanently displace masses of workers), and find its proposed solutions pretty much totally impossible.
(1) I agree that a big concentration of wealth is a bad thing for our society, but frankly I don't think most people are actually bothered by that very much at all. I think it's too abstract an issue for much political interest these days. (Is there much difference to the average voter nowadays if CEOs earn millions of dollars, or tens-of-millions of dollars? Any difference if the richest quintile own 40% or 60% of assets?)
(2) I don't think there's any way the U.S. public would accept cutting every citizen a check for $25,000 per year, or any amount. Our culture is adamant that pay without work is immoral. Right-wing rhetoric has really been precisely fine-tuned over the years to make any possibility of payments like that, or even discussion about it, sound totally absurd. The political environment today is marching directly away from social-program-type funding, not closer to it.
(3) I'm cynical enough to even be a bit skeptical that global income payments would be beneficial, psychologically, to the majority of people. As an example, most lottery winners wind up with ruined finances and marriages. The single anecdote of "Harry Potter" being the product of a welfare mother cannot be extrapolated to a universal creative renaissance. (I can't remember which SF book took it as a possibility, some Stephenson or Gibson novel, but I was skeptical of that when I first read it.) As someone else pointed out, government payments on this magnitude would also probably create skyrocketing inflation (much like college tuition).
(4) The possibilities of funding a global payment are, at best, just tricks to make an expanded social benefit not look like it. You can't disassociate checks to every citizen from money taken in by the government, as the article tries to argue. (a) Advertising on every dollar bill, road surface, and public space? Bleagh! (That's his #1 idea.) (b) What most resemble his "extreme income taxes" (like big inheritances) are right now being rolled back to zero in the U.S. (c) Lotteries, fines, and auctions are notorious for being sucked in to the general budget even when "earmarked" for specific expenses. (d) The most likely example is the Alaskan oil-payment fund, but I would think that too could evaporate as soon as some political interest wants it used for a different purpose, especially on a national stage.
(5) To complicate matters, I agree that lower-class service jobs can be automated, and that middle-class technical jobs can be outsourced offshore. However, I see no compelling argument that classic "esteemed" jobs like doctors and lawyers can be downsized in the same fashion.
So in conclusion, I totally agree that increased automation of service-sector jobs will work to increase unemployment and lower wages -- robots will no
Not my students. >(
And what you said doesnt make any sense, you act like a person must get a B in every single class they ever took in college, we all know that this is very unlikely as most people are humans who have strengths and weaknesses.
Actually, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think you'll find that most people going to Harvard did in fact get A's in all their prior courses, regardless of their major. Probably so too while they're at college.
Okay, I'm going to overlook the fact that the primary poster of the thread is pursuing personal edification, and not a particular educational track, so the fact that grades are given doesn't seem to be a relevant concern in his case.
Let me see if I can be helpful in this sub-thread. I'm an adjunct faculty member at a community college, I've taught for going on two years now. I'll speculate that I'm teaching in the same region you're going to school, based on the 4-year institutions you're looking at.
If I could give one crucial insight to my students, that I usually have to bite my tongue on, it's this. 4-year schools have expectations which are an order of magnitude beyond those of 2-year community colleges. My biggest challenge in teaching now is to take my experiences at a 4-year (state) school and dial them way down to a level where my students can pass the course, with some getting A's. Maybe my two best students in a class of 20 seem to be doing work that would be appropriate at a 4-year school.
I would encourage you to not shy away from any courses at a community college. The hardest class in your school will be just a taste of what you'll be asked to do at any 4-year school. You need to find this out about yourself, if you can function at this level, sooner rather than later. If you're worried about passing a math course at a community college, the honest truth is, Harvard is not in the cards. My guess is that a school like Harvard is not going to distinguish much past "4.0 or not 4.0?" when looking at a GPA from a community college.
Not to say that other colleges you mention are not a possibility. I write quite a few recommendations for my students to go to Northeastern and BU, but even those are generally just my "A" students.
Actually, that's not true. If you read the actual judgement here , you'll find that the strongest argument centered around patents, in the following vein:
(1) Google claimed its rankings were opinion and thus protected by the First Amendment.
(2) Search King claimed that they couldn't be opinions precisely because Google holds a patent on the process used to make them.
(3) The judge found Search King's argument "not wholly without merit" (p. 6), but that Google could still alter the result of that patented process in a subjective manner and thus it was protected as free speech.
The critical argument by Search King (p. 5):
Hmmm. There's a contradiction in there regarding the threat to sue Linus for patent violations, I think.
Writing viruses was actually covered in the assembly language class I took at UMaine circa 1992, in the last chapter of the instructor-written textbook. The rationale in that case was that in informing CS students how easy it is to write viruses, they would no longer see them as technically impressive and therefore not be interested in pursuing their creation. (I just taught my first assembly class this past semester, and use this as an anecdote without actually covering it myself.)
Since I have the text right here, I'll quote it: "...you do not have to be a genius to write a virus... Some people use virus writing to prove their programming skill, but this is poor proof of such skill in my opinion. It's about as much proof of genius as throwing a brick through a window."
From the article: "For a research investment to be justified, it must produce value equal to or greater than that of the investment."
I find this extremely questionable. History is full of scientific discoveries and ideas which were not able to produce equal or greater value for long time. Can anyone enlighten me about the value produced by Einstein's research?
Einstein's most important results had no research investment funding it whatsoever. Hence, it does not serve as a counterexample to an assertion about "research investment".
The best that occurs to me, aside from lobbying Congress (ha!), is to boycott the companies, declaring we want fair use back. It's the oldest rule of capitalism: Vote with your feet. If imposing copy protection schemes results in making less money, the industry realize its error a heck of a lot faster than any amount of criticism or lawbreaking. (They'd rather be rich if unpopular.)
When exactly did this ever work? No one ever secured civil rights by engaging capitalism -- at best, you get differently-branded product.
The only way to secure civil rights of any sort is through legislation, by engaging the political process (which occasionally has included revolution). If we think that capitalism can ever rationally solve problems like these, then "the terrorists have already won".
The other respondents, frankly, have it right. Not to be belligerent, but your attitude represents everything that would give me a splitting headache when I worked in industry. (I teach now instead.)
It's not the office workers' job to manage data-migration, nor should it be... nor is it their job to test phone lines, set up cube walls, replace the lighting fixtures, or perform OSHA inspections on their workplace.
You're all pissy because management won't accede to turning off all the used office applications from the server? Maybe you should bring in a dog and kick it in the middle of your presentation, that'll make your point even better.
This is one the best essays on software engineering I've read in a while. As a programmer and CS educator, it's really served to crystallize for me why (a) it seems so much harder for students to learn programming these days, and (b) why I've grown unhappy over the years with the series of new engineering paradigms that are in use. Extremely helpful for putting my own thoughts in order.
The law statement itself, "all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky" may possibly get included in my personal "top 10" aphorisms manifesto.