Why don't table lamps count? It's the way Apple chooses to sell mid-range systems. Personally I think it's a bad idea. There's a market for a mid-range Apple Desktop not tied to a monitor it seems to me, but that's their business decision not mine. It's inarguable that the iMac is a decent mid-range system, though the monitor bundling tends to make it more expensive that it could be if I could just use my old monitor like with a 'desktop' PC.
We have 300 million people in America. I'm sorry, but I really can expect our elected officials to be good, completely good, and not "shades in between."
OK, I'm a pretty liberal guy when it comes to definitions of "good" and "evil", but seriously... You know ANYONE who is "completely good"? I sure don't (and I include myself in this number. I've done things I'm not proud of). this might be one of the more ridiculous posts I've seen lately.
Well, there's getting facts wrong and there's being horrifyingly ignorant about basic concepts. The woman could not articulate an opinion on the Bush Doctrine. It's been the cornerstone of US foreign policy for last 6 years (right or wrong) and she couldn't talk about it. Worse, it's a really conceptually simple idea (get them before they get us, essentially), articulated by the current president, who happens to be a member of her own party. That's like not being able to tie her own political shoes. To claim that being able to see Russia gives her foreign policy experience when she can't speak intelligently about the most basic concept of the currently foreign policy is not a mistake, it's like claiming a PhD (or at least a bachelors degree) in physics but being unclear on what gravity is. Biden may have gotten a few equations wrong, Palin didn't comprehend the foundational theory.
To be fair she got better as the campaign went on; but it still felt like she was mastering the presented material, not actually understanding the theoretical underpinnings that made it all work. I'm not saying she's stupid, I don't have enough information to base such a statement on; but she was clearly very unprepared for the role. The types of mistakes she made were just much more fundamental than the mistakes Biden made.
And then all those Southern Democrats felt so betrayed that a Democratic President signed the CRA into law that hey defected to the Republicans. Forty years is a long time and things have changed.
That's because for most people "Disapprove of Congress" != "Disapprove of my Congressperson". There's always a bit of "He supported the failed policies of $incumbent_congressional_party" in any race against an incumbent; but mostly congressional races focus on the people running, not the policies of the Congress as a whole. For some people it's a choice between parties, for others a choice between individuals, but rarely is it a choice between "supported current congress or not". Besides, in most cases even if the person running against the incumbent isn't actually currently in Congress, there is a very good chance that they hold some other public office or have done so recently. Chances are there's been a good chance for people to become disapproving of them too.
But unless she's working overtime she's done for the week. 3 twelves is a full workweek for most nurses, then they get 4 days off. Granted they don't usually work them in a row, but still. I wish I could talk my boss into that. Hell, I'd do three 13s and a fourteen for the other 4 days off.
He did that too. I learned more about the ancient world in that class than in any other two or three history classes. He treated the Old Testament as what it is from an archaeological/historical prospective. One source among many for the history of the Hebrews and surrounding cultures. A remarkable feat for a man who also regarded as a source of divine wisdom. He did all of this in a way that also showed some of the humor of the original authors; and how stuffed up (or plain wrong) some of the later translators were.
Vegas casinos do just this, though they make it seem like a good thing. "99.9%" payout signs are all over the place in Vegas. This tells anyone with a reasonable understanding of statistics that more people lose than win. The problem is everyone think that they are a little smarter/luckier than average, and the odd are awfully close...
Personally when I go to the casino I treat it as an entertainment expense. I have x dollars to lose on the games, just like if it were an arcade. In the unlikely event that I win more than I lose it's lagniappe.
The tried-and-true way works: if you have evidence, take it to the police. If the police won't do anything, take it to the press. Sure it takes a little longer, but it keeps - in this case your internet connection - safe from the Random Crusader.
Umm... I think the Washington Post is generally considered the Press. Hence when the Washington Post writes and article, it's just like taking it to the press. Exactly like, really. When the Washington Post calls the upstream ISP for comment and the up stream ISP decides to immediately server the offending party's bandwidth, That makes it the press writing a story, and a company with a legitimate right to cancel service doing so. No vigilantes or crusaders involved, caped or otherwise. Amazing what you can learn when you read the article.
Seems to me that only a minority of spam actually advertises a product anymore. Most of the spam these days seems to be links to malware, links to scam sites, out right scams in the e-mails themselves, or malware attachments. Even if ever legitimate business that uses spam to advertise stopped tomorrow, I doubt it would slow the flow all that much.
This is obviously a worst case scenario, but when I was in Iraq my unit was based out of New Orleans, Louisiana. Toward the end of our deployment Hurricane Katrina struck. While quite a number of text messages did get through in a timely fashion (and one helped a soldier coordinate for the rescue of his girlfriend and their baby), we received others weeks later. I specifically recall one guy getting a hurricane related text message just as we were about to turn our phones off to fly out of country. We may have even got more, but the SIM chips on our cell phones were only good on the Iraqi cell phone system.
Like I said, extreme circumstances, but natural disasters are exactly when you might want to get messages quickly.
You and the post above you are correct. I should have said he never had more than a 50-50 election result. That's what I was thinking, but I wrote approval rating, which totally distorted my meaning. Sorry.
Figures that this is the first time in weeks that I don't have mod points. I hate to mindlessly post "I agree", but in this case I'm hoping to draw attention to the AC above. Someone like (and no I'm not recommending him, nor do I think he'd take the job) Steve Jobs, who has a fair understanding of the technology and the vision to see how and where it should be used is exactly what would be be needed. Jobs himself is almost certainly to controversial, and probably would rather run Apple anyway, but surely he's not the only guy with a reasonable understanding of technology and the vision to use it?
But think about it, a really representative panel of that sort would really need someone representing, say, Microsoft, maybe Apple, maybe HP and/or Dell, and then a couple of FOSS guys. Imagine Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, RMS, and ESR on such a committee. Easily imagined. Now imagine anything getting done by this committee, ever... Not so easily imagined. When the closed source guys were not fighting over which of their personal pet technologies was best for a given purpose, they'd be in grid-lock as RMS and the FOSS guys try to block all proprietary anything. I'd be inclined to say that the closed source people should get 4 seats and the FOSS 3 seats: on the theory that it's more likely that at least on closed source advocate would side with FOSS on a given specific question than that the the FOSS guys will ever side with the closed source guys, and if all 4 cosed source guys agree with something it's likely to be a least a slightly open system.
Still I think one guy, preferably fairly neutral and willing to work with all parties and being advised by a committee like you recommend, would be better. He might not always do what any one of us might want or hope he'd do, but a least something will get done.
So... Virtually every Republican in Congress is a RINO? And things like the Texas State Republican Platform are just badly misnamed? Whew! That's a relief...
Had the John McCain running for President this year been the John McCain that existed 2 years ago, the John McCain that we saw a glimmer of in his concession speech last night, I might have seriously considered voting for him. Instead we got an angry old man looking buffoonish trying to please the party's hard-line conservative base while still claiming to be a maverick. I can't understand what he was thinking.
(Seriously, did you really think most of us actually bought that shit?)
The guy never had better than a 50-50 approval rating and by the time the the torture stuff really hit the fan it was a lot lower. Had the 2004 election happened in 2006 Kerry would have won in a landslide, but sadly in 2004 W. still had enough people fooled to squeak by. Seriously, Americans are not a monolithic group think over here. We have different opinions on all kind of issues. I would think, given your 6 digit UID, that you've been reading/. long enough to get an idea for how "Americans" are no more in agreement on any one issue than any other large group on the face of the Earth.
Pretty simple really. While people might disapprove of "Congress", they rarely disapprove of "their congress-person" as a result. "Congress" is 535 people... It's relatively easy for voters to disapprove of what those people are doing as a group while still feeling that the one or two people that are actually being voted for are doing a reasonable job. The greatest number of Congress-critters that any one person will be voting for at any one time is three (one rep and two senators), and even that is an exceptional circumstance... most of the time a state's two senators don't come up for re-election in the same year. One or two is the norm. It's much easier to like one or two people than it is to like the policies of a body with 535 members.
In the US, the fifth amendment means you don't have to give them your encryption keys if you feel it "may tend to incriminate you". If you're not in the US, then I don't know your local laws. It won't exactly look good for you if you refuse to provide the key, but they can't make you and they can't used any evidence they can't get too.
My view is that ethics is the practical application of morals. Much like engineering is the practical application of science, but without the clean line of either:-). Moral dictates are absolute. This is not to say that they are not different between people, cultures or even an individual's lifetime; but within a specific time, place and person, they are firm rules. Killing people is bad, helping others is good, stealing is bad, taking care of your family is good. Most people rate morals on a hierarchy, they'd consider killing worse that stealing, and stealing a lot worse than stealing a little. My personal moral code, and I suspect the codes of most people at the most basic level, are based on the level of harm or suffering that an action causes to others. Even most religious based codes have this are their core (The Golden Rule and The Sermon on the Mount both argue for this in Christianity, several Prophet argue for it in Judaism, similar ideas exist inside of Buddhism, and most forms of Hinduism, etc), but may be modified by specific requirements of a holy writing, an interpretation, or a desire to please God.
Ethics is the practical application of these absolute moral strictures. In the real world there is seldom a pure moral choice, it's always a choice of situational ethics. Which choice, based on available information, will cause less suffering? Less harm? Of these two or three, or four moral imperatives, which is more important? Because you can only please one (or maybe two, or maybe all but not perfectly, whatever). Is it better to imperfectly follow two moral strictures than perfectly follow one while ignoring another? Beyond that comes facts that are not influenced by your morals. Maybe you know that your boss won't fire you if you refuse to do something against your moral code, because he's a good guy. That makes the ethical choice a lot easier.
In most cases the outcome of a choice cannot be predicted perfectly. Maybe the clear moral choice will lead to greater suffering down the road. Ethically we should consider that. An ideal example of this IMHO is sex ed. Many Christians feel sex out of wedlock is immoral, the clear moral choice for them is therefore to limit or ignore sex ed. Often this choice leads to teen-pregnancy, STDs, abortions, etc. Might the better ethical choice have been to have strong sex ed, despite that it seems the less moral choice, to prevent greater moral problems down the road?
Moral questions are easy. Clearly it is immoral to do the screen scraping program. He shouldn't do it, I agree. Ethical questions are much more complicated. They require a lot more background than is given in this post. How likely is the poster to be fired if he refuses to do the work (it may be that he can refuse with little risk if he is otherwise very well thought of)? Does he have a family? How much does his family depend on his income? Does he have a savings to tide him over? Even without a family I consider that I have a moral obligation to myself. Somewhere on my hierarchy of things that are good and bad, I place helping myself as good and hurting myself as bad. Depending on how much I am going hurt myself by quiting or being fired, and how much the screen scrap is going to hurt someone, I may make the ethical decision that helping myself is more important than helping some nameless person who is unlikely to even notice the small harm being done to them.
Ethics is always about situations. Often those situations are clear, I should not take loads of money from other people so that I can have a really big boat. I'm doing a lot of harm to a lot of people and only benefiting myself and maybe my family. This is a lot grayer, and we don't know all the details. All things being equal, I agree that the poster should not do the work. Things are rarely equal. There are a ton of factors that might make it a lot better for almost everyone if he did it. There are an equal number of factors that might make it even more obvious that he shouldn't do it.
Ok, I wrote a long post about this earlier, but I'll try again. Moral and ethics are different. Morals are absolutes "killing people is bad," ethics are situational "Killing people is bad, but if I don't kill this guy he'll kill the man he's hitting with a bat." Morals are your "code;" ethics are how you apply your code to real life. If my sick five year old needs health insurance and $200 a month in drugs to survive and I quit my job over screen scrapping, I've either have a really screwed up sense of priorities or I made the wrong ethical choice. Even though screen scrapping may be against my morals their may be other moral priorities that prevent me from quiting over it.
In the real world ethical people must often do things that are morally wrong to prevent other things that are morally wrong. In this case the screen scrapping is morally wrong, but at a much lower level of priority than many other things that are morally wrong. It's also morally wrong to let your dependents become homeless while you look for a job.
Ethics is a multifaceted issue though. Let's say the poster has a wife and two kids. If he quits his job over an ethics issue, they will suffer. Depending on how quickly he can get a new job, they may suffer a little or a lot. So his actions can cause some significant suffering to those he love. This would be unethical.
Which is more unethical? The issue being discussed is unlikely to bring significant suffering to anyone, but may a very low grade of suffering to possibly a lot of people in the company being targeted. On the other hand quitting is likely to bring a moderate degree of suffering and perhaps a good deal more to those who may depend on the poster for support (Maybe he's a single parent of two small children, it's an unlikely but possible scenario). Now if he was covering up for his company's dumping of chemical waste that was potentially killing people, there would be little ethical comparison. But if it's a choice between keeping the house and doing something that's, at worst, likely to annoy an admin in the other company, a responsible parent or spouse should probably look for a job WHILE continuing the current one and covering their ass.
Ethics and morals are not the same thing. It is clearly immoral (at least by the standards of most users of this site) to scrape content and resell it as your own. But ethics is not about an absolute decision of right or wrong, it's about weighing choices to determine which choice is best given a set of moral priorities. It is a moral dictate that you not steal someone's work and sell it as your own, it is a moral dictate that you should take care of those who depend on you. Which dictate has priority in this case? That's ethics, and every person will have their own answer, and may even change that answer depending on the exact circumstances.
Maybe my wife has a really good job and I know I can quit without repercussions for my family, that's a weighting factor. Maybe the company we're talking about stealing from is a one man operation barely making it, that might tend to increase the amount of suffering the scraping could do. Maybe my one dependent is a sick little girl who HAS to have medical coverage and chunk of money every month to live... Ethics are determined by circumstances, and aren't always clear.
No reason you couldn't run an office suite on a phone. We'd need a bit more memory on the phone, probably, but that'll come. I'm thinking of it longer term. I don't particularly want to be able to use my iPhone this way, but if the next gen iPhone came out with the equivalent of a Pentium class CPU and 64-128MB of RAM, it could run a decent array of software. Give it the software and some multitasking in the OS, maybe develop an industry standard cradle.
Then instead of public Internet terminals in Airports, and cafes you jut have a place to plug in your phone. Slap it in the cradle at the airport and even on the plane, work on your presentation. Slap it into the cradle in the client's office to give your presentation. Slap it in the cradle at the hotel, check your e-mail, video phone your family, and maybe sync your presentation back to your 'real' computer back home. For that matter, log into the real computer if you need to do work on it that requires significant resources. I'm not saying that something like this would replace workstation computers, but it could marry the best of what laptops do with the portability of a phone. Some people might prefer to carry something more powerful (like a 'real' laptop), but this could seriously reduce the amount you have to use such a beast.
In the short term, this would be a novelty.. Maybe a few place have cradles here and there for the people who pay the top dollar for such powerful "phones". Smart phones in general were a novelty for years, so were laptops for that matter. If it catches on it could be a paradigm shift.
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Why don't table lamps count? It's the way Apple chooses to sell mid-range systems. Personally I think it's a bad idea. There's a market for a mid-range Apple Desktop not tied to a monitor it seems to me, but that's their business decision not mine. It's inarguable that the iMac is a decent mid-range system, though the monitor bundling tends to make it more expensive that it could be if I could just use my old monitor like with a 'desktop' PC.
We have 300 million people in America. I'm sorry, but I really can expect our elected officials to be good, completely good, and not "shades in between."
OK, I'm a pretty liberal guy when it comes to definitions of "good" and "evil", but seriously... You know ANYONE who is "completely good"? I sure don't (and I include myself in this number. I've done things I'm not proud of). this might be one of the more ridiculous posts I've seen lately.
Well, there's getting facts wrong and there's being horrifyingly ignorant about basic concepts. The woman could not articulate an opinion on the Bush Doctrine. It's been the cornerstone of US foreign policy for last 6 years (right or wrong) and she couldn't talk about it. Worse, it's a really conceptually simple idea (get them before they get us, essentially), articulated by the current president, who happens to be a member of her own party. That's like not being able to tie her own political shoes. To claim that being able to see Russia gives her foreign policy experience when she can't speak intelligently about the most basic concept of the currently foreign policy is not a mistake, it's like claiming a PhD (or at least a bachelors degree) in physics but being unclear on what gravity is. Biden may have gotten a few equations wrong, Palin didn't comprehend the foundational theory.
To be fair she got better as the campaign went on; but it still felt like she was mastering the presented material, not actually understanding the theoretical underpinnings that made it all work. I'm not saying she's stupid, I don't have enough information to base such a statement on; but she was clearly very unprepared for the role. The types of mistakes she made were just much more fundamental than the mistakes Biden made.
And then all those Southern Democrats felt so betrayed that a Democratic President signed the CRA into law that hey defected to the Republicans. Forty years is a long time and things have changed.
That's because for most people "Disapprove of Congress" != "Disapprove of my Congressperson". There's always a bit of "He supported the failed policies of $incumbent_congressional_party" in any race against an incumbent; but mostly congressional races focus on the people running, not the policies of the Congress as a whole. For some people it's a choice between parties, for others a choice between individuals, but rarely is it a choice between "supported current congress or not". Besides, in most cases even if the person running against the incumbent isn't actually currently in Congress, there is a very good chance that they hold some other public office or have done so recently. Chances are there's been a good chance for people to become disapproving of them too.
But unless she's working overtime she's done for the week. 3 twelves is a full workweek for most nurses, then they get 4 days off. Granted they don't usually work them in a row, but still. I wish I could talk my boss into that. Hell, I'd do three 13s and a fourteen for the other 4 days off.
He did that too. I learned more about the ancient world in that class than in any other two or three history classes. He treated the Old Testament as what it is from an archaeological/historical prospective. One source among many for the history of the Hebrews and surrounding cultures. A remarkable feat for a man who also regarded as a source of divine wisdom. He did all of this in a way that also showed some of the humor of the original authors; and how stuffed up (or plain wrong) some of the later translators were.
I had a professor like that in college, he was a Lutheran Minister and an archeology PhD. He made the Bible hysterical.
Vegas casinos do just this, though they make it seem like a good thing. "99.9%" payout signs are all over the place in Vegas. This tells anyone with a reasonable understanding of statistics that more people lose than win. The problem is everyone think that they are a little smarter/luckier than average, and the odd are awfully close...
Personally when I go to the casino I treat it as an entertainment expense. I have x dollars to lose on the games, just like if it were an arcade. In the unlikely event that I win more than I lose it's lagniappe.
The tried-and-true way works: if you have evidence, take it to the police. If the police won't do anything, take it to the press. Sure it takes a little longer, but it keeps - in this case your internet connection - safe from the Random Crusader.
Umm... I think the Washington Post is generally considered the Press. Hence when the Washington Post writes and article, it's just like taking it to the press. Exactly like, really. When the Washington Post calls the upstream ISP for comment and the up stream ISP decides to immediately server the offending party's bandwidth, That makes it the press writing a story, and a company with a legitimate right to cancel service doing so. No vigilantes or crusaders involved, caped or otherwise. Amazing what you can learn when you read the article.
Seems to me that only a minority of spam actually advertises a product anymore. Most of the spam these days seems to be links to malware, links to scam sites, out right scams in the e-mails themselves, or malware attachments. Even if ever legitimate business that uses spam to advertise stopped tomorrow, I doubt it would slow the flow all that much.
This is obviously a worst case scenario, but when I was in Iraq my unit was based out of New Orleans, Louisiana. Toward the end of our deployment Hurricane Katrina struck. While quite a number of text messages did get through in a timely fashion (and one helped a soldier coordinate for the rescue of his girlfriend and their baby), we received others weeks later. I specifically recall one guy getting a hurricane related text message just as we were about to turn our phones off to fly out of country. We may have even got more, but the SIM chips on our cell phones were only good on the Iraqi cell phone system.
Like I said, extreme circumstances, but natural disasters are exactly when you might want to get messages quickly.
You and the post above you are correct. I should have said he never had more than a 50-50 election result. That's what I was thinking, but I wrote approval rating, which totally distorted my meaning. Sorry.
Figures that this is the first time in weeks that I don't have mod points. I hate to mindlessly post "I agree", but in this case I'm hoping to draw attention to the AC above. Someone like (and no I'm not recommending him, nor do I think he'd take the job) Steve Jobs, who has a fair understanding of the technology and the vision to see how and where it should be used is exactly what would be be needed. Jobs himself is almost certainly to controversial, and probably would rather run Apple anyway, but surely he's not the only guy with a reasonable understanding of technology and the vision to use it?
But think about it, a really representative panel of that sort would really need someone representing, say, Microsoft, maybe Apple, maybe HP and/or Dell, and then a couple of FOSS guys. Imagine Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, RMS, and ESR on such a committee. Easily imagined. Now imagine anything getting done by this committee, ever... Not so easily imagined. When the closed source guys were not fighting over which of their personal pet technologies was best for a given purpose, they'd be in grid-lock as RMS and the FOSS guys try to block all proprietary anything. I'd be inclined to say that the closed source people should get 4 seats and the FOSS 3 seats: on the theory that it's more likely that at least on closed source advocate would side with FOSS on a given specific question than that the the FOSS guys will ever side with the closed source guys, and if all 4 cosed source guys agree with something it's likely to be a least a slightly open system.
Still I think one guy, preferably fairly neutral and willing to work with all parties and being advised by a committee like you recommend, would be better. He might not always do what any one of us might want or hope he'd do, but a least something will get done.
So... Virtually every Republican in Congress is a RINO? And things like the Texas State Republican Platform are just badly misnamed? Whew! That's a relief...
Had the John McCain running for President this year been the John McCain that existed 2 years ago, the John McCain that we saw a glimmer of in his concession speech last night, I might have seriously considered voting for him. Instead we got an angry old man looking buffoonish trying to please the party's hard-line conservative base while still claiming to be a maverick. I can't understand what he was thinking.
(Seriously, did you really think most of us actually bought that shit?)
The guy never had better than a 50-50 approval rating and by the time the the torture stuff really hit the fan it was a lot lower. Had the 2004 election happened in 2006 Kerry would have won in a landslide, but sadly in 2004 W. still had enough people fooled to squeak by. Seriously, Americans are not a monolithic group think over here. We have different opinions on all kind of issues. I would think, given your 6 digit UID, that you've been reading /. long enough to get an idea for how "Americans" are no more in agreement on any one issue than any other large group on the face of the Earth.
Pretty simple really. While people might disapprove of "Congress", they rarely disapprove of "their congress-person" as a result. "Congress" is 535 people... It's relatively easy for voters to disapprove of what those people are doing as a group while still feeling that the one or two people that are actually being voted for are doing a reasonable job. The greatest number of Congress-critters that any one person will be voting for at any one time is three (one rep and two senators), and even that is an exceptional circumstance... most of the time a state's two senators don't come up for re-election in the same year. One or two is the norm. It's much easier to like one or two people than it is to like the policies of a body with 535 members.
In the US, the fifth amendment means you don't have to give them your encryption keys if you feel it "may tend to incriminate you". If you're not in the US, then I don't know your local laws. It won't exactly look good for you if you refuse to provide the key, but they can't make you and they can't used any evidence they can't get too.
My view is that ethics is the practical application of morals. Much like engineering is the practical application of science, but without the clean line of either :-). Moral dictates are absolute. This is not to say that they are not different between people, cultures or even an individual's lifetime; but within a specific time, place and person, they are firm rules. Killing people is bad, helping others is good, stealing is bad, taking care of your family is good. Most people rate morals on a hierarchy, they'd consider killing worse that stealing, and stealing a lot worse than stealing a little. My personal moral code, and I suspect the codes of most people at the most basic level, are based on the level of harm or suffering that an action causes to others. Even most religious based codes have this are their core (The Golden Rule and The Sermon on the Mount both argue for this in Christianity, several Prophet argue for it in Judaism, similar ideas exist inside of Buddhism, and most forms of Hinduism, etc), but may be modified by specific requirements of a holy writing, an interpretation, or a desire to please God.
Ethics is the practical application of these absolute moral strictures. In the real world there is seldom a pure moral choice, it's always a choice of situational ethics. Which choice, based on available information, will cause less suffering? Less harm? Of these two or three, or four moral imperatives, which is more important? Because you can only please one (or maybe two, or maybe all but not perfectly, whatever). Is it better to imperfectly follow two moral strictures than perfectly follow one while ignoring another? Beyond that comes facts that are not influenced by your morals. Maybe you know that your boss won't fire you if you refuse to do something against your moral code, because he's a good guy. That makes the ethical choice a lot easier.
In most cases the outcome of a choice cannot be predicted perfectly. Maybe the clear moral choice will lead to greater suffering down the road. Ethically we should consider that. An ideal example of this IMHO is sex ed. Many Christians feel sex out of wedlock is immoral, the clear moral choice for them is therefore to limit or ignore sex ed. Often this choice leads to teen-pregnancy, STDs, abortions, etc. Might the better ethical choice have been to have strong sex ed, despite that it seems the less moral choice, to prevent greater moral problems down the road?
Moral questions are easy. Clearly it is immoral to do the screen scraping program. He shouldn't do it, I agree. Ethical questions are much more complicated. They require a lot more background than is given in this post. How likely is the poster to be fired if he refuses to do the work (it may be that he can refuse with little risk if he is otherwise very well thought of)? Does he have a family? How much does his family depend on his income? Does he have a savings to tide him over? Even without a family I consider that I have a moral obligation to myself. Somewhere on my hierarchy of things that are good and bad, I place helping myself as good and hurting myself as bad. Depending on how much I am going hurt myself by quiting or being fired, and how much the screen scrap is going to hurt someone, I may make the ethical decision that helping myself is more important than helping some nameless person who is unlikely to even notice the small harm being done to them.
Ethics is always about situations. Often those situations are clear, I should not take loads of money from other people so that I can have a really big boat. I'm doing a lot of harm to a lot of people and only benefiting myself and maybe my family. This is a lot grayer, and we don't know all the details. All things being equal, I agree that the poster should not do the work. Things are rarely equal. There are a ton of factors that might make it a lot better for almost everyone if he did it. There are an equal number of factors that might make it even more obvious that he shouldn't do it.
Ok, I wrote a long post about this earlier, but I'll try again. Moral and ethics are different. Morals are absolutes "killing people is bad," ethics are situational "Killing people is bad, but if I don't kill this guy he'll kill the man he's hitting with a bat." Morals are your "code;" ethics are how you apply your code to real life. If my sick five year old needs health insurance and $200 a month in drugs to survive and I quit my job over screen scrapping, I've either have a really screwed up sense of priorities or I made the wrong ethical choice. Even though screen scrapping may be against my morals their may be other moral priorities that prevent me from quiting over it.
In the real world ethical people must often do things that are morally wrong to prevent other things that are morally wrong. In this case the screen scrapping is morally wrong, but at a much lower level of priority than many other things that are morally wrong. It's also morally wrong to let your dependents become homeless while you look for a job.
Ethics is a multifaceted issue though. Let's say the poster has a wife and two kids. If he quits his job over an ethics issue, they will suffer. Depending on how quickly he can get a new job, they may suffer a little or a lot. So his actions can cause some significant suffering to those he love. This would be unethical.
Which is more unethical? The issue being discussed is unlikely to bring significant suffering to anyone, but may a very low grade of suffering to possibly a lot of people in the company being targeted. On the other hand quitting is likely to bring a moderate degree of suffering and perhaps a good deal more to those who may depend on the poster for support (Maybe he's a single parent of two small children, it's an unlikely but possible scenario). Now if he was covering up for his company's dumping of chemical waste that was potentially killing people, there would be little ethical comparison. But if it's a choice between keeping the house and doing something that's, at worst, likely to annoy an admin in the other company, a responsible parent or spouse should probably look for a job WHILE continuing the current one and covering their ass.
Ethics and morals are not the same thing. It is clearly immoral (at least by the standards of most users of this site) to scrape content and resell it as your own. But ethics is not about an absolute decision of right or wrong, it's about weighing choices to determine which choice is best given a set of moral priorities. It is a moral dictate that you not steal someone's work and sell it as your own, it is a moral dictate that you should take care of those who depend on you. Which dictate has priority in this case? That's ethics, and every person will have their own answer, and may even change that answer depending on the exact circumstances.
Maybe my wife has a really good job and I know I can quit without repercussions for my family, that's a weighting factor. Maybe the company we're talking about stealing from is a one man operation barely making it, that might tend to increase the amount of suffering the scraping could do. Maybe my one dependent is a sick little girl who HAS to have medical coverage and chunk of money every month to live... Ethics are determined by circumstances, and aren't always clear.
Well, while a few people have answered your questions or poked holes in your argument, I'd like to point out that this is on of the few:
"1. ... ... ...
2.
Profit!"
Posts that has an actual chance of profiting. I think you must be doing something wrong :-)
No reason you couldn't run an office suite on a phone. We'd need a bit more memory on the phone, probably, but that'll come. I'm thinking of it longer term. I don't particularly want to be able to use my iPhone this way, but if the next gen iPhone came out with the equivalent of a Pentium class CPU and 64-128MB of RAM, it could run a decent array of software. Give it the software and some multitasking in the OS, maybe develop an industry standard cradle.
Then instead of public Internet terminals in Airports, and cafes you jut have a place to plug in your phone. Slap it in the cradle at the airport and even on the plane, work on your presentation. Slap it into the cradle in the client's office to give your presentation. Slap it in the cradle at the hotel, check your e-mail, video phone your family, and maybe sync your presentation back to your 'real' computer back home. For that matter, log into the real computer if you need to do work on it that requires significant resources. I'm not saying that something like this would replace workstation computers, but it could marry the best of what laptops do with the portability of a phone. Some people might prefer to carry something more powerful (like a 'real' laptop), but this could seriously reduce the amount you have to use such a beast.
In the short term, this would be a novelty.. Maybe a few place have cradles here and there for the people who pay the top dollar for such powerful "phones". Smart phones in general were a novelty for years, so were laptops for that matter. If it catches on it could be a paradigm shift.