If I make a lot of money, I want to wear an old skool suit, like 19th century style, with a vest, and if I can pull it off, an eaton collar... and a cool pocketwatch.
Not to look cool or anything; just because I like the feeling of that period, and I feel we've lost something by abandoning our cultural costumes....
Actually, as a law student, soon to be a lawyer, I can tell you that what he's done is basically about the best you can do in lots of cases with our legal system.
In common law countries, lots of discretion is usually given to judges to determine tough questions. In civil law countries, the statutes basically determine what they can do, and they try to lay everything out in the statutes.
Thus, civil law tends to be more efficient, more black and white, but common law systems tend to have fairer results. When everything is laid out in the statute in excruciating detail, it's inevitable that there are loopholes, and people exploit these. But in our system, legislatures generally avoid creating loopholes by being more general, and letting the judge and jury make the determination as to whether certain conduct falls within a statute...
So we research cases to see what previous decisions have found, and try to predict based on these what the court will say. This is the REAL law, and maybe now you can see that it's not so cut and dried.
I agree that lawyers are not going to give a great legal brief to someone for free, but even a great legal brief often can't answer a question with a clear yes or no. This is something many people don't understand about our legal system.
What he did in this article was to give people an idea of the issues and the likely conclusion without doing tons of preparation and work on researching the particular case law. That's the most you can reasonably expect from an article like this. So he's not avoiding the issue. He's just giving a reasonable answer with a reasonable amount of work.
The answer is truth. Life is shit for some people, better for others, and awesome for a few.
The quicker people recognize that truth, the quicker they can get on with trying to do something to make their own lives better, because they're the only ones that really care enough about it to do so.
Self interest is completely logical, and essential to progress. And I would beg to differ with you on morals as well - morals can be based on logical principles - it's just that most people don't do so!
Self-interest is the basis for both biological evolution and economic trade. Clearly, those things are absolutely essential to progress. They got us where we are today. Even people working for so-called altruistic causes such as environmental preservation are acting in their own self-interest, as they feel a strong personal desire to preserve the environment.
Would those people be willing to allow me to do their work for them, promoting environmental causes? Of course not! Why not? Because it's not in my self-interest! But you would argue - they should be able to trust in me, trust in another person to act in their interest? It's a fundamental principle that people work their asses off for things in their interest, and can't be trusted to do so for things in others' interest.
Morals can be based on economic principles or any other principles you want to base them on. Morals are just some rules of thumb regarding how to treat people... I base my morals on my basic drive to be happy with myself, my self-interest, and autonomy and economics. I base my morals on these things because I believe they are all important to maintaining societal progress in the form of economic development and improved efficiency and happiness.
First, it's usually no 'accident' that people end up with the children they conceived. I'm at a complete loss as to what you could mean by that.
Second, you are railing against a natural fact of life, which is not that horrible in my opinion. Are you against families? Are you against parents working to support themselves and their children?? Cause I'll tell you, if that stops working, just about every civilized country can kiss that civilization goodbye.
Basic economics tells us that it costs nothing, and is basically fair, to let things work naturally, such as families. If you want to do something to change the natural state of affairs, it's going to cost a ton of money, like trying to keep all forests free of debris!
You're not 'penalized' because your mom's a crack whore. A penalty is a loss imposed on you that reduces your welfare from its previous level. There's no 'reduction' occurring to your welfare when your mom's a crack whore. It's just shitty to begin with! You can't say a blind person from birth has been 'penalized'... That makes no sense.
If you want to do something to help those people, it's because you want to provide them with an unearned benefit to artificially IMPROVE their lot.
That's the main problem. They probably can't make that one copy for commercial uses. Yes, ad revenue does count, so their use would be considered commercial.
Great comment. I would like to point out that one of the problems with reliance on expert opinion is always their potential self-interest.
Experts usually have an interest in their own stature, prestige, business, or industry. They may have personal ethics that require them to attempt to give disinterested opinions, but there is always room for others to doubt the extent to which their opinions are objective.
The problem is also that only the expert has the information necessary to give the opinion, and it's therefore tough for anyone else to verify its veracity.
This is why we require doctors to get informed consent in some cases (although it's anyone's guess how much the layman can really understand), and have ethical codes for lawyers that they must study and be tested on, with penalties for violation, which try to prevent conflicts of interest and opportunism... But of course, we still have to depend mostly on the experts themselves to stay honest.
The mild shortage of flu vaccine that was felt recently in the U.S. was thought to be a direct result of the fact that there's usually no money in making and selling flu vaccine.
Lots of representatives at that time were talking about giving specific companies the rights to make and sell the vaccine in order to increase the incentive to produce it.
I hope when you say 'spoken like a true lawyer,' you don't mean one of the ones you want to shoot... I have not met the sorts of lawyers you describe, but if I had, I'm sure I'd have the same or an even worse reaction.
The fact is that poor behavior has been too often tolerated in the legal profession, and bars should be much tougher about cleaning up their image by throwing out the bad apples. Only then will the common perception of the profession begin to improve again.
There are sanctions, but as you say, they are not enough. Rule 11 and bar rules are not invoked enough, and do not carry tough penalties often enough.
Nonetheless, the lawyers I've known are all an upstanding and ethical bunch, and I respect the profession a great deal. I think law and lawyers in our system are usually good and necessary things, and hope we can do something about the bad lawyers out there.
I beg to differ. Without lawyers the big companies would never deal with the small ones -- they would just steal your work, or do without it. The law allows you to protect your work enough to contract for some value in exchange for it, and allows the big fish to protect themselves from risk.
There are certainly big costs to our system of law, but when you look around the world, you will probably come to the conclusion that those costs are greatly outweighed by the transactions that we are able to accomplish, exactly because each party knows what they're going to get out of the deals.
In many countries, you can never really be sure whether the other party to a deal will screw you or not. Thus, the risk of doing such deals may be more than you will accept, and you don't do them. This means many many opportunities for efficient market operation are lost.
The reason people hate lawyers is because there's a big cost to their work. But these people never think about the alternative -- the costs in a world without our system of law and our lawyers. Sure, if you trust the other guy, things might usually work out fine. But one bad result and many many people might give up on entrepreneurship altogether.
And regarding the adversary system, would you really trust a judge to research and consider all the arguments available on your behalf under the law, as opposed to a lawyer who's working for you? We get much better results when people are given the jobs to do that they have the incentive to do the best.
There are a lot of other problems we need to deal with in our legal system, but fundamentally, it's a very much better system than most alternatives.
Right. There is not a single country on the entire continent of Africa that functions at anywhere near the level of the U.S., U.K., Japan, France, Germany, etc., etc., with _possibly_ the remote exception of South Africa, which has been dominated by the Dutch.
Clearly, none of you guys know what this is all about. The PTO basically made up this requirement and was rejecting applications based on it -- it somehow snuck in from EU law.
This decision simply says that when the law and the case law of the Federal Circuit don't contain such a requirement, the PTO can't just make up something like that and apply it to reject applications.
This is also a great decision because the test is completely impossible to apply in practice. It's not a practical way to approach differentiating statutory and non-statutory subject matter.
It's the education of business people managing developers, not the education of developers.
Programmers would love to fix flaws in their code. Managers are the force that prevents this from happening. And they do it because of economics, and because of the way they've been trained to disregard the opinions of technical employees.
Um, that wouldn't work for any other products, so why do you think it would work for software? You can't give hospitals a 'beta' heart monitor and just say "try it out, but don't expect it to always work right"...
You would get tagged with a product liability suit. In most cases, you can't sell something to the public, whatever you say about it, if it's liable to explode or kill someone.
The law will catch up with software, just as it did with railroads in the 19th century. For a long time, courts were loathe to impose tort liability on railroads, at leat partly because the industry was still developing. Eventually, they could not deny the hazards, and started holding the railroads liable...
A patent is emphatically NOT a statement by the government "regulating the market."
A patent is a statement by the government granting a property right. It is therefore a statement in fact creating a market, not regulating that market.
Furthermore, regulation is required for smoothly functioning capitalist markets, in order to prevent self-dealing, asset substitution, etc., etc. Simply put, regulation is required to create the level playing field we need for people to trust in the market.
Patents merely create yet another property right that can be traded, and therefore help to allow more efficient allocation of innovative ideas, such as where an inventor lacks the assets to produce his invention...
The creation of property rights is a fundamental prerequisite for any capitalist market.
I would like to add that ANY electronic storage is more volatile than paper, i.e., it can get destroyed more easily, and that ANY kind of encryption makes your data brittle.
Encrypting data onto a USB drive is like hiding it somewhere where no one, even you, can find it without (1) a computer, (2) the right OS, (3) the right software, (4) the right media reader, (5) an uncorrupted, un-bashed-up, and reasonably new USB drive with the data, (6) your key, and (7) your passphrase.
Putting it on paper, on the other hand, provides instant access without any of those things, but only to someone right next to the document. It can't be instantly copied or stolen, at least without someone being right there in front of you, and it lasts for hundreds of years. The only real drawbacks are that it's heavy and hard to modify. But who's modifying these things? I vote for paper.
The problem is that in a bookstore, the bookstore owns the book, and no copying occurs by either the bookstore or the browser.
In google's case, they copy, then you copy to view a snip. Arguably the actions in allowing a user to see a snip are fair use, but the problem is that google is actually copying these things and storing the entire text in a database in the first place.
I think the interesting legal question is whether copying should be permitted when technologically required to exercise fair use rights. My answer would be yes, but only for the express purpose of exercising rights well within the fair use exception.
IMHO, A court would have to go out on a limb to find for google here, but it would be the right result. They would have to craft a rule that strictly limits google's use of the data though. Otherwise, wholesale copying would not be justifiable.
On the other hand, one may ask the question whether such a rule is really workable -- what if the copier is not google but some other individual? Can a copyright holder really be expected to litigate the uses of every copier, where the copier is allowed to copy the entire work for use later?
The exception would have to be very narrow, the burden of proof would have to be on the copier for this to be feasible.
Nope. As a law student studying patent law, I can tell you that it's settled law in the U.S. Inventions involving software can be patented.
They do, however, have to create a concrete and tangible result. In other words, in order to be patentable, an algorithm cannot merely be a transformation on abstract data or numbers, but must at least be a transformation that generates as a result some data that is 'concrete and tangible'. This means that the result must have some meaning in the real world, and cannot be merely abstract numbers.
This requirement is met by a number indicating a price, as in State Street. Exactly what is concrete and tangible may play out a bit more in the courts, and in fact, may change over time, but the patentability of software is settled.
You forgot - breakdown of family structure, cohesion, and discipline.
This is a big one. There will continue to be a minority of successful intellectuals in the U.S., and they will be the ones with strong family structure and discipline, that inculcates the values of learning, planning, pragmatism, etc.
I agree, but only to some extent. Democracy is really about placating the masses so they don't revolt...
But the government can't placate tiny minorities if it seriously interferes with the operation of government, business, the economy, etc.
This is becoming a big problem, because now, as has been noted regarding smartmobs, etc., tiny minorities can easily organize to focus their energy and cause great disruptions. When fanatic liberals converged on Seattle to protest the WTO meeting a few years back, they created huge problems. But they are merely a tiny tiny fraction of the populace. If the government can find a way to placate them without creating problems for the rest of us, fine, but I really don't want my representatives wasting their time trying to implement all the cockamamie wishes of crazy unshowered college kids.
My life at one company consisted of 20+ hour days many times a month. NO weekends off for up to 5 months at a time. Getting chewed out for showing up at 10am after going home after 5am that morning to catch 3-4hrs sleep and getting a quad venti latte just to see straight.
Further, getting chewed out because we didn't meet the deadlines for the under-bid projects whose schedules were set in stone, and completely unrealistic, before any investigation or risk-assessment was done.
Developing health problems was just a matter of time. Try dealing with disturbing health problems in such a situation. Basically a 9:30/10am to 3+am job every day, with no days off. My incredible wife used to make me dinner and bring it to me to eat in the office, and surf the web on a free machine late at night, just to see me sometimes.
Dude. You really cannot talk about what actual life is without recognizing that some of what people say is true. What I experienced was probably just about as bad as it can get. I was born to code. I love it. I've been programming since I was in 2nd grade. I loved the chances I had to write cool code until at some point, I just had to admit that it was completely stupid and ridiculous what we were doing. We were literally killing ourselves. I probably took years off my life doing that.
Our parents did not prepare us for exploitation. They said to work hard for our companies, get ahead, do well, be a success, do something you love... But some of us have found that people can be just as easily exploited now as they were many years ago.
I am one of the first people to say 'suck it up' when people whine about shit. But I am not whining here. I am saying that as a human being, there is only so much you should be expected to suck up. Even if you love what you do, you won't anymore if you have this much crap thrust upon you.
There should be a limit, and we should warn people coming out of school that there are many many companies out there that will try repeatedly to go beyond this limit.
Slashdot Mirror
If I make a lot of money, I want to wear an old skool suit, like 19th century style, with a vest, and if I can pull it off, an eaton collar... and a cool pocketwatch.
Not to look cool or anything; just because I like the feeling of that period, and I feel we've lost something by abandoning our cultural costumes....
Actually, as a law student, soon to be a lawyer, I can tell you that what he's done is basically about the best you can do in lots of cases with our legal system.
In common law countries, lots of discretion is usually given to judges to determine tough questions. In civil law countries, the statutes basically determine what they can do, and they try to lay everything out in the statutes.
Thus, civil law tends to be more efficient, more black and white, but common law systems tend to have fairer results. When everything is laid out in the statute in excruciating detail, it's inevitable that there are loopholes, and people exploit these. But in our system, legislatures generally avoid creating loopholes by being more general, and letting the judge and jury make the determination as to whether certain conduct falls within a statute...
So we research cases to see what previous decisions have found, and try to predict based on these what the court will say. This is the REAL law, and maybe now you can see that it's not so cut and dried.
I agree that lawyers are not going to give a great legal brief to someone for free, but even a great legal brief often can't answer a question with a clear yes or no. This is something many people don't understand about our legal system.
What he did in this article was to give people an idea of the issues and the likely conclusion without doing tons of preparation and work on researching the particular case law. That's the most you can reasonably expect from an article like this. So he's not avoiding the issue. He's just giving a reasonable answer with a reasonable amount of work.
The answer is truth. Life is shit for some people, better for others, and awesome for a few.
The quicker people recognize that truth, the quicker they can get on with trying to do something to make their own lives better, because they're the only ones that really care enough about it to do so.
Self interest is completely logical, and essential to progress. And I would beg to differ with you on morals as well - morals can be based on logical principles - it's just that most people don't do so!
Self-interest is the basis for both biological evolution and economic trade. Clearly, those things are absolutely essential to progress. They got us where we are today. Even people working for so-called altruistic causes such as environmental preservation are acting in their own self-interest, as they feel a strong personal desire to preserve the environment.
Would those people be willing to allow me to do their work for them, promoting environmental causes? Of course not! Why not? Because it's not in my self-interest! But you would argue - they should be able to trust in me, trust in another person to act in their interest? It's a fundamental principle that people work their asses off for things in their interest, and can't be trusted to do so for things in others' interest.
Morals can be based on economic principles or any other principles you want to base them on. Morals are just some rules of thumb regarding how to treat people... I base my morals on my basic drive to be happy with myself, my self-interest, and autonomy and economics. I base my morals on these things because I believe they are all important to maintaining societal progress in the form of economic development and improved efficiency and happiness.
First, it's usually no 'accident' that people end up with the children they conceived. I'm at a complete loss as to what you could mean by that.
Second, you are railing against a natural fact of life, which is not that horrible in my opinion. Are you against families? Are you against parents working to support themselves and their children?? Cause I'll tell you, if that stops working, just about every civilized country can kiss that civilization goodbye.
Basic economics tells us that it costs nothing, and is basically fair, to let things work naturally, such as families. If you want to do something to change the natural state of affairs, it's going to cost a ton of money, like trying to keep all forests free of debris!
You're not 'penalized' because your mom's a crack whore. A penalty is a loss imposed on you that reduces your welfare from its previous level. There's no 'reduction' occurring to your welfare when your mom's a crack whore. It's just shitty to begin with! You can't say a blind person from birth has been 'penalized'... That makes no sense.
If you want to do something to help those people, it's because you want to provide them with an unearned benefit to artificially IMPROVE their lot.
No, it's like fining someone for not having any security at their international airport.
And guess what? The libraries actually pay for those books. They can't populate the whole library with photocopies.
That's the main problem. They probably can't make that one copy for commercial uses. Yes, ad revenue does count, so their use would be considered commercial.
I fought him yesterday, and I actually won. I ended up with a nice spaghetti dinner.
Great comment. I would like to point out that one of the problems with reliance on expert opinion is always their potential self-interest.
Experts usually have an interest in their own stature, prestige, business, or industry. They may have personal ethics that require them to attempt to give disinterested opinions, but there is always room for others to doubt the extent to which their opinions are objective.
The problem is also that only the expert has the information necessary to give the opinion, and it's therefore tough for anyone else to verify its veracity.
This is why we require doctors to get informed consent in some cases (although it's anyone's guess how much the layman can really understand), and have ethical codes for lawyers that they must study and be tested on, with penalties for violation, which try to prevent conflicts of interest and opportunism... But of course, we still have to depend mostly on the experts themselves to stay honest.
The mild shortage of flu vaccine that was felt recently in the U.S. was thought to be a direct result of the fact that there's usually no money in making and selling flu vaccine.
Lots of representatives at that time were talking about giving specific companies the rights to make and sell the vaccine in order to increase the incentive to produce it.
I hope when you say 'spoken like a true lawyer,' you don't mean one of the ones you want to shoot... I have not met the sorts of lawyers you describe, but if I had, I'm sure I'd have the same or an even worse reaction.
The fact is that poor behavior has been too often tolerated in the legal profession, and bars should be much tougher about cleaning up their image by throwing out the bad apples. Only then will the common perception of the profession begin to improve again.
There are sanctions, but as you say, they are not enough. Rule 11 and bar rules are not invoked enough, and do not carry tough penalties often enough.
Nonetheless, the lawyers I've known are all an upstanding and ethical bunch, and I respect the profession a great deal. I think law and lawyers in our system are usually good and necessary things, and hope we can do something about the bad lawyers out there.
I beg to differ. Without lawyers the big companies would never deal with the small ones -- they would just steal your work, or do without it. The law allows you to protect your work enough to contract for some value in exchange for it, and allows the big fish to protect themselves from risk.
There are certainly big costs to our system of law, but when you look around the world, you will probably come to the conclusion that those costs are greatly outweighed by the transactions that we are able to accomplish, exactly because each party knows what they're going to get out of the deals.
In many countries, you can never really be sure whether the other party to a deal will screw you or not. Thus, the risk of doing such deals may be more than you will accept, and you don't do them. This means many many opportunities for efficient market operation are lost.
The reason people hate lawyers is because there's a big cost to their work. But these people never think about the alternative -- the costs in a world without our system of law and our lawyers. Sure, if you trust the other guy, things might usually work out fine. But one bad result and many many people might give up on entrepreneurship altogether.
And regarding the adversary system, would you really trust a judge to research and consider all the arguments available on your behalf under the law, as opposed to a lawyer who's working for you? We get much better results when people are given the jobs to do that they have the incentive to do the best.
There are a lot of other problems we need to deal with in our legal system, but fundamentally, it's a very much better system than most alternatives.
Right. There is not a single country on the entire continent of Africa that functions at anywhere near the level of the U.S., U.K., Japan, France, Germany, etc., etc., with _possibly_ the remote exception of South Africa, which has been dominated by the Dutch.
Clearly, none of you guys know what this is all about. The PTO basically made up this requirement and was rejecting applications based on it -- it somehow snuck in from EU law.
This decision simply says that when the law and the case law of the Federal Circuit don't contain such a requirement, the PTO can't just make up something like that and apply it to reject applications.
This is also a great decision because the test is completely impossible to apply in practice. It's not a practical way to approach differentiating statutory and non-statutory subject matter.
It's the education of business people managing developers, not the education of developers.
Programmers would love to fix flaws in their code. Managers are the force that prevents this from happening. And they do it because of economics, and because of the way they've been trained to disregard the opinions of technical employees.
Um, that wouldn't work for any other products, so why do you think it would work for software? You can't give hospitals a 'beta' heart monitor and just say "try it out, but don't expect it to always work right"...
You would get tagged with a product liability suit. In most cases, you can't sell something to the public, whatever you say about it, if it's liable to explode or kill someone.
The law will catch up with software, just as it did with railroads in the 19th century. For a long time, courts were loathe to impose tort liability on railroads, at leat partly because the industry was still developing. Eventually, they could not deny the hazards, and started holding the railroads liable...
A patent is emphatically NOT a statement by the government "regulating the market."
A patent is a statement by the government granting a property right. It is therefore a statement in fact creating a market, not regulating that market.
Furthermore, regulation is required for smoothly functioning capitalist markets, in order to prevent self-dealing, asset substitution, etc., etc. Simply put, regulation is required to create the level playing field we need for people to trust in the market.
Patents merely create yet another property right that can be traded, and therefore help to allow more efficient allocation of innovative ideas, such as where an inventor lacks the assets to produce his invention...
The creation of property rights is a fundamental prerequisite for any capitalist market.
I would like to add that ANY electronic storage is more volatile than paper, i.e., it can get destroyed more easily, and that ANY kind of encryption makes your data brittle.
Encrypting data onto a USB drive is like hiding it somewhere where no one, even you, can find it without (1) a computer, (2) the right OS, (3) the right software, (4) the right media reader, (5) an uncorrupted, un-bashed-up, and reasonably new USB drive with the data, (6) your key, and (7) your passphrase.
Putting it on paper, on the other hand, provides instant access without any of those things, but only to someone right next to the document. It can't be instantly copied or stolen, at least without someone being right there in front of you, and it lasts for hundreds of years. The only real drawbacks are that it's heavy and hard to modify. But who's modifying these things? I vote for paper.
The problem is that in a bookstore, the bookstore owns the book, and no copying occurs by either the bookstore or the browser.
In google's case, they copy, then you copy to view a snip. Arguably the actions in allowing a user to see a snip are fair use, but the problem is that google is actually copying these things and storing the entire text in a database in the first place.
I think the interesting legal question is whether copying should be permitted when technologically required to exercise fair use rights. My answer would be yes, but only for the express purpose of exercising rights well within the fair use exception.
IMHO, A court would have to go out on a limb to find for google here, but it would be the right result. They would have to craft a rule that strictly limits google's use of the data though. Otherwise, wholesale copying would not be justifiable.
On the other hand, one may ask the question whether such a rule is really workable -- what if the copier is not google but some other individual? Can a copyright holder really be expected to litigate the uses of every copier, where the copier is allowed to copy the entire work for use later?
The exception would have to be very narrow, the burden of proof would have to be on the copier for this to be feasible.
Nope. As a law student studying patent law, I can tell you that it's settled law in the U.S. Inventions involving software can be patented.
They do, however, have to create a concrete and tangible result. In other words, in order to be patentable, an algorithm cannot merely be a transformation on abstract data or numbers, but must at least be a transformation that generates as a result some data that is 'concrete and tangible'. This means that the result must have some meaning in the real world, and cannot be merely abstract numbers.
This requirement is met by a number indicating a price, as in State Street. Exactly what is concrete and tangible may play out a bit more in the courts, and in fact, may change over time, but the patentability of software is settled.
Yeah. But the rubber stamp usually says 'rejected'. Over 90% of the time, by the way.
You forgot - breakdown of family structure, cohesion, and discipline.
This is a big one. There will continue to be a minority of successful intellectuals in the U.S., and they will be the ones with strong family structure and discipline, that inculcates the values of learning, planning, pragmatism, etc.
I agree, but only to some extent. Democracy is really about placating the masses so they don't revolt...
But the government can't placate tiny minorities if it seriously interferes with the operation of government, business, the economy, etc.
This is becoming a big problem, because now, as has been noted regarding smartmobs, etc., tiny minorities can easily organize to focus their energy and cause great disruptions. When fanatic liberals converged on Seattle to protest the WTO meeting a few years back, they created huge problems. But they are merely a tiny tiny fraction of the populace. If the government can find a way to placate them without creating problems for the rest of us, fine, but I really don't want my representatives wasting their time trying to implement all the cockamamie wishes of crazy unshowered college kids.
mmm. ACTUAL life.
My life at one company consisted of 20+ hour days many times a month. NO weekends off for up to 5 months at a time. Getting chewed out for showing up at 10am after going home after 5am that morning to catch 3-4hrs sleep and getting a quad venti latte just to see straight.
Further, getting chewed out because we didn't meet the deadlines for the under-bid projects whose schedules were set in stone, and completely unrealistic, before any investigation or risk-assessment was done.
Developing health problems was just a matter of time. Try dealing with disturbing health problems in such a situation. Basically a 9:30/10am to 3+am job every day, with no days off. My incredible wife used to make me dinner and bring it to me to eat in the office, and surf the web on a free machine late at night, just to see me sometimes.
Dude. You really cannot talk about what actual life is without recognizing that some of what people say is true. What I experienced was probably just about as bad as it can get. I was born to code. I love it. I've been programming since I was in 2nd grade. I loved the chances I had to write cool code until at some point, I just had to admit that it was completely stupid and ridiculous what we were doing. We were literally killing ourselves. I probably took years off my life doing that.
Our parents did not prepare us for exploitation. They said to work hard for our companies, get ahead, do well, be a success, do something you love... But some of us have found that people can be just as easily exploited now as they were many years ago.
I am one of the first people to say 'suck it up' when people whine about shit. But I am not whining here. I am saying that as a human being, there is only so much you should be expected to suck up. Even if you love what you do, you won't anymore if you have this much crap thrust upon you.
There should be a limit, and we should warn people coming out of school that there are many many companies out there that will try repeatedly to go beyond this limit.