I see what you did there.... it's called poisoning the well. You attack the basis on which one could disagree by, without any actual substantiation, drawing a connection between that position and something which could be (or perhaps even ought to be) considered ethically questionable. It would not matter how well thought out or rational a conflicting opinion might be, since your own emotional and intellectual disposition towards them has already biased you against them... it's important to realize, however, that this isn't a particularly rational argument.
In fact, it is just one form of ad hominem attack, but is characterized by its pre-emptive attack nature, and that it does not typically directly attack the arguer.
Wow... two excuses in one. "Everybody does it", and "it's not that bad"... Most pirates tend to focus on just one rationalization at a time, then later move the goalposts to defend their actions from a different point as their argument starts to wear thin. Color me suitably impressed.
Some of the excuses you'll find in this list may look familiar.
And yeah... I see copyright infringement, any copyright infringement, as unethical, because the research I've done into the subject shows me that copyright has historically been extremely good for society as a whole (it played an enormous part in the popularization of literacy, for example), and how without it, I can all too easily see that society would be lead down a path where *EVERY* work published by somebody who is not sponsored by the government would then have to compete for popularity with the spam, cheap porn, and cat videos.... of which there seems to be an inexhaustible abundance.
But, as I said above, I don't expect to change anybody's mind.
Considering your previous responses,his does not surprise me in the least.
And yes... you do have an agenda... you've just been rationalizing your actions to yourself for so long you've lost the ability to perceive it objectively. I don't know exactly what it is or why it is... but it's definitely there.
I don't have to want it to matter to other people... decent people already tend to prefer legitimacy to less honorable approaches to a situation, when the roads are reasonably equal. I simply put it forward that for programs on network TV, the illegitimate avenue for acquiring content does not hold any *significant* advantages over a completely legal one, unless one has a personal agenda that is specifically geared against patronizing the companies that broadcast such content.
Legitimacy allows a person to live one's life transparently... without any necessity whatsoever to keep something secret because it might be perceived as as wrong by society. I do not advocate that people should not be entitled to privacy, only that people who are acting responsibly do not do things, even in private, that if something should happen that it ever did become public, they would not be prepared to be held accountable for.
Previous seasons are quite readily available on DVD.
The excuses that people use to pirate seems quite truly inexhaustible. When you stop trying to rationalize piracy, you'll start to realize that the legitimate avenues that do exist are really not really so terrible.
As a member of a former Nielson ratings household, I can say that I always found it incredibly annoying always having to log into a set-top box whenever I turned on the television... plus I seem to recall having to periodically re-log in to the box every hour or so, if I was doing a TV marathon, just so that it would know we weren't just leaving the TV idle.
If you have to ask that question, when legitimate means do exist, then it's clear that you already have a personal agenda that is biased against corporations and media companies for whatever reason.
I don't really care that you'd rather bittorrent something than use legitimate approaches to acquire it. I asked why *normal* people would bother pirating something from network TV when legitimate means exist. If legitimacy doesn't matter to you, that's your own problem. If you can't see why it might matter to other people, that's also your own problem.
It's a lot easier do well on a test by cheating... that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
My point is that other means probably exist for being able to watch network tv programs that don't involve necessarily sitting in front of the TV while it's on, or even necessarily having a television, and that those means are not particularly inconvenient. More importantly, they are legitimate.
I can sort of get why people pirate GoT (although I don't agree with it... I can understand it)... because it's my understanding that it otherwise requires a subscription that isn't necessarily practical or convenient for many people.
But the other two are on network television, and I'm not sure why a person would bother pirating that when there are almost certainly more legitimate ways to access it I'm not a fan of HIMYM, but I do like Big Bang Theory, and I've had absolutely no difficulty watching it online this season, completely legally, every single week.
Maybe this is just a Canadian thing, but CTV, the Canadian network that carries Big Bang Theory, puts a lot of their programs online one day after airing it, and people have 7 to 14 days to watch it. BBT is up every Friday.
There's some 4 to 8 orders of magnitude difference between how fast a computer can scan some text and how fast a human can do the same. Watson would know the text effectively instantly, and could spend a few extra moments thinking about it before anybody else could even *POSSIBLY* know what the problem had even said. There's nowhere close to that many orders of magnitude difference between the reading speeds of people who are smart enough to get on Jeopardy in the first place.
If you think of how short the time scale is between the clue and the answer is under ordinary circumstances on Jeopardy anyways, no... Watson did not come up with an answer in approximately the same time that humans did. Watson had a few extra moments to think about the answer between the time that the clue is revealed and the time it would take any human to simply read it. SImply put, Watson had an advantage of knowing at least what the scope of the clue was before the human contestants.
This does not diminish the accomplishment of the engineers that designed Watson. It's amazing regardless. My only point is that Watson had an unfair advantage in the game. That's all.
I didn't miss the point of the exercise at all. It was an amazing computing accomplishment.
But they didn't establish that it could do so just as quickly, or quicker, than humans who are presented with the same data, because Watson already knew what all of the relevant data was before the human competitors had finished reading or hearing the first word of the clue. Those few tenths of a second matter when you're talking about doing something that requires fast response, and all it showed is that Watson's thinking could beat human reflexes (which again, is no small feat), not that it could beat human thought. If the rate that it was presented the data was slowed down to about 14.4kbps or so, roughly equivalent to how fast a very fast reader might take in the clue, I'm wondering if it really would have fared as well.
When the USA was threatened with SOPA, many critics united from all over the world in an almost single voice to make their objections to it known... and the impact was felt.
With Canada now facing the same issue, I cannot help but wonder if other countries will be as willing to help a country that may only have a tenth of the population, but is one that is supposed to be no less free.
On the Jeopardy challenge, the text of the clues was given to Watson at the moment the clue was revealed. This communication, using any modern network technology, would take milliseconds at most, but would still be perceived as effectively simultaneous to when the clue is uncovered. However, this gives an easily measurable advantage to Watson, who can being parsing the meaning of the sentence several moments before the human contestants have even finished knowing what the clue actually says... since a great deal of the challenge of Jeopardy is in the timing of when to buzz in, humans would have less time than Watson to prepare to buzz in (on the order of tenths of a second, more than likely, but more than enough to make a difference, IMO).
Far be it for me to come across as diminishing what the developers of Watson did... it's extremely impressive, but I'd have to wonder if it would have done as well if the text of the clue had been fed to it a little more slowly... say, at a fixed speed of 14.4kbps, which corresponds roughly with what a very fast reader could absorb text at. This would have demonstrated, IMO, whether a computer could really solve the problem faster than a human could, or if it could actually solve a problem faster than human reaction time to visual/audible input (which in humans, I believe, is going to be the slower of the two processes).
Anyways, the countries where population is growing fastest are the poorer countries, not the ones where people have higher education that they can take for granted. In countries like the USA, birth rates are just barely at replacement levels, and several other industrialized countries have fallen below replacement!
The reason an employer should need a reason to fire somebody even while an employee doesn't need any reason to quit is because the the employer is already in a position of considerable control over the employee already anyways, being able to dictate such things as what work is expected, amount of compensation, and whether or not the employee even has a job in the first place. Employers and employees are not equal, and it is blindly foolish to treat them as if they are. Requiring the employer to at the very least have a good reason for dismissing somebody at least tries to balance that out.
While the employer admittedly takes a risk hiring somebody that they do not have confidence will be interested in staying with them.... I would suggest that an employer who cannot afford to have an employee quit is probably not in a position to be hiring one in the first place.
Anyways, it should be up to the employer to assess whether an employee can fit into that company's corporate structure during the employee's probationary period (during which time the employee will probably not be in receipt of things like company benefits, or something similar)
You moved the goalposts there... you were addressing the rights that "at will" employment offers an employee, when in fact those rights exist regardless.
Nonetheless, to answer your question, because doing so, particularly unnecessarily, drives up the cost of supporting the employment insurance benefits or possibly even social welfare programs that have to support a person who is jobless.
I'm not suggesting at all that everybody is owed a living... I'm suggesting that at the very least, a good reason should exist for being dismissed from any job that a person has had for longer than their probationary period. Of course, this concept is foreign in "at will" employment states.
For what it's worth, not being able to perform the job satisfactorily is a perfectly reasonable grounds for dismissal... although I would think that a company should have an effective enough training program in place to determine this within the first few weeks of employment anyways. If their performance starts to suffer after they have been with the company for a long time, where they had previously always had a satisfactory performance record, then I think the employer has an obligation to inform the employee that they need to improve (ideally in writing, so that there is a paper trail, and the employee should sign such a notice to indicate that they understand the problem and will work to correct it). If the employee shows unwillingness or inability to improve, either because they were not willing to sign such a notice, or if reasonable opportunity is given for improvement after the notice (subjective, but probably not less than a couple of weeks), but none is evident from the employee, then again, it's completely fair to dismiss the incompetent employee.
I don't agree with the above poster that "at will" employment is an actual scam, but I'd certainly agree that it's entirely biased in favor of the employer, and offers an employee absolutely nothing that they don't already have on constitutional grounds.
I don't know Haskell because nobody that I personally know uses it so I've had no need to learn
FTFY
Please say what you mean next time... unless you are genuinely meaning to infer that everyone who knows a particular language must be a "nobody", as in nobody who is important or worthwhile... which is a rather tactless thing to say, if you ask me.
An employer that is terminating someone for reasons that they are explicitly declining to mention because they aren't exactly legal is probably already prepared for that contingency, or else they wouldn't be firing them yet. They would know that the onus is upon the former employee to still prove that the reason is illegal, and if the employer knows he hasn't tipped their hand on that front, then any threat of litigation against him is going to be at the very least only an idle one, and at most simply a waste of money for the former employee. In a nutshell, they could simply ignore it, unless the employee actually does hire a lawyer.
Employees could quit for any or no reason anyways... even without "at will employment", owing to laws prohibiting slavery. The employer simply has no contractual obligation to someone who quits without notice outside of pay for work already completed.
That's my point... so I don't get why the US bothers to try to make laws like this that are only certain to be found inconvenient by some employers... when those same employers can just fire the employees anyways, and not give any reason for dismissal.
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you did there.... it's called poisoning the well. You attack the basis on which one could disagree by, without any actual substantiation, drawing a connection between that position and something which could be (or perhaps even ought to be) considered ethically questionable. It would not matter how well thought out or rational a conflicting opinion might be, since your own emotional and intellectual disposition towards them has already biased you against them... it's important to realize, however, that this isn't a particularly rational argument.
In fact, it is just one form of ad hominem attack, but is characterized by its pre-emptive attack nature, and that it does not typically directly attack the arguer.
Wow... two excuses in one. "Everybody does it", and "it's not that bad"... Most pirates tend to focus on just one rationalization at a time, then later move the goalposts to defend their actions from a different point as their argument starts to wear thin. Color me suitably impressed.
Some of the excuses you'll find in this list may look familiar.
And yeah... I see copyright infringement, any copyright infringement, as unethical, because the research I've done into the subject shows me that copyright has historically been extremely good for society as a whole (it played an enormous part in the popularization of literacy, for example), and how without it, I can all too easily see that society would be lead down a path where *EVERY* work published by somebody who is not sponsored by the government would then have to compete for popularity with the spam, cheap porn, and cat videos.... of which there seems to be an inexhaustible abundance.
But, as I said above, I don't expect to change anybody's mind.
Considering your previous responses,his does not surprise me in the least.
And yes... you do have an agenda... you've just been rationalizing your actions to yourself for so long you've lost the ability to perceive it objectively. I don't know exactly what it is or why it is... but it's definitely there.
I don't have to want it to matter to other people... decent people already tend to prefer legitimacy to less honorable approaches to a situation, when the roads are reasonably equal. I simply put it forward that for programs on network TV, the illegitimate avenue for acquiring content does not hold any *significant* advantages over a completely legal one, unless one has a personal agenda that is specifically geared against patronizing the companies that broadcast such content.
Legitimacy allows a person to live one's life transparently... without any necessity whatsoever to keep something secret because it might be perceived as as wrong by society. I do not advocate that people should not be entitled to privacy, only that people who are acting responsibly do not do things, even in private, that if something should happen that it ever did become public, they would not be prepared to be held accountable for.
The excuses that people use to pirate seems quite truly inexhaustible. When you stop trying to rationalize piracy, you'll start to realize that the legitimate avenues that do exist are really not really so terrible.
As a member of a former Nielson ratings household, I can say that I always found it incredibly annoying always having to log into a set-top box whenever I turned on the television... plus I seem to recall having to periodically re-log in to the box every hour or so, if I was doing a TV marathon, just so that it would know we weren't just leaving the TV idle.
And yet the single largest amount of piracy of US TV shows by country comes from the USA itself.
Your example fails to reflect the case for which I was arguing... which is network TV, where the show is already being aired.
If you have to ask that question, when legitimate means do exist, then it's clear that you already have a personal agenda that is biased against corporations and media companies for whatever reason.
I don't really care that you'd rather bittorrent something than use legitimate approaches to acquire it. I asked why *normal* people would bother pirating something from network TV when legitimate means exist. If legitimacy doesn't matter to you, that's your own problem. If you can't see why it might matter to other people, that's also your own problem.
It's a lot easier do well on a test by cheating... that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
My point is that other means probably exist for being able to watch network tv programs that don't involve necessarily sitting in front of the TV while it's on, or even necessarily having a television, and that those means are not particularly inconvenient. More importantly, they are legitimate.
I can sort of get why people pirate GoT (although I don't agree with it... I can understand it)... because it's my understanding that it otherwise requires a subscription that isn't necessarily practical or convenient for many people.
But the other two are on network television, and I'm not sure why a person would bother pirating that when there are almost certainly more legitimate ways to access it I'm not a fan of HIMYM, but I do like Big Bang Theory, and I've had absolutely no difficulty watching it online this season, completely legally, every single week.
Maybe this is just a Canadian thing, but CTV, the Canadian network that carries Big Bang Theory, puts a lot of their programs online one day after airing it, and people have 7 to 14 days to watch it. BBT is up every Friday.
There's some 4 to 8 orders of magnitude difference between how fast a computer can scan some text and how fast a human can do the same. Watson would know the text effectively instantly, and could spend a few extra moments thinking about it before anybody else could even *POSSIBLY* know what the problem had even said. There's nowhere close to that many orders of magnitude difference between the reading speeds of people who are smart enough to get on Jeopardy in the first place.
If you think of how short the time scale is between the clue and the answer is under ordinary circumstances on Jeopardy anyways, no... Watson did not come up with an answer in approximately the same time that humans did. Watson had a few extra moments to think about the answer between the time that the clue is revealed and the time it would take any human to simply read it. SImply put, Watson had an advantage of knowing at least what the scope of the clue was before the human contestants.
This does not diminish the accomplishment of the engineers that designed Watson. It's amazing regardless. My only point is that Watson had an unfair advantage in the game. That's all.
I didn't miss the point of the exercise at all. It was an amazing computing accomplishment.
But they didn't establish that it could do so just as quickly, or quicker, than humans who are presented with the same data, because Watson already knew what all of the relevant data was before the human competitors had finished reading or hearing the first word of the clue. Those few tenths of a second matter when you're talking about doing something that requires fast response, and all it showed is that Watson's thinking could beat human reflexes (which again, is no small feat), not that it could beat human thought. If the rate that it was presented the data was slowed down to about 14.4kbps or so, roughly equivalent to how fast a very fast reader might take in the clue, I'm wondering if it really would have fared as well.
When the USA was threatened with SOPA, many critics united from all over the world in an almost single voice to make their objections to it known... and the impact was felt.
With Canada now facing the same issue, I cannot help but wonder if other countries will be as willing to help a country that may only have a tenth of the population, but is one that is supposed to be no less free.
On the Jeopardy challenge, the text of the clues was given to Watson at the moment the clue was revealed. This communication, using any modern network technology, would take milliseconds at most, but would still be perceived as effectively simultaneous to when the clue is uncovered. However, this gives an easily measurable advantage to Watson, who can being parsing the meaning of the sentence several moments before the human contestants have even finished knowing what the clue actually says... since a great deal of the challenge of Jeopardy is in the timing of when to buzz in, humans would have less time than Watson to prepare to buzz in (on the order of tenths of a second, more than likely, but more than enough to make a difference, IMO).
Far be it for me to come across as diminishing what the developers of Watson did... it's extremely impressive, but I'd have to wonder if it would have done as well if the text of the clue had been fed to it a little more slowly... say, at a fixed speed of 14.4kbps, which corresponds roughly with what a very fast reader could absorb text at. This would have demonstrated, IMO, whether a computer could really solve the problem faster than a human could, or if it could actually solve a problem faster than human reaction time to visual/audible input (which in humans, I believe, is going to be the slower of the two processes).
Anyways, the countries where population is growing fastest are the poorer countries, not the ones where people have higher education that they can take for granted. In countries like the USA, birth rates are just barely at replacement levels, and several other industrialized countries have fallen below replacement!
While the employer admittedly takes a risk hiring somebody that they do not have confidence will be interested in staying with them.... I would suggest that an employer who cannot afford to have an employee quit is probably not in a position to be hiring one in the first place.
Anyways, it should be up to the employer to assess whether an employee can fit into that company's corporate structure during the employee's probationary period (during which time the employee will probably not be in receipt of things like company benefits, or something similar)
You moved the goalposts there... you were addressing the rights that "at will" employment offers an employee, when in fact those rights exist regardless.
Nonetheless, to answer your question, because doing so, particularly unnecessarily, drives up the cost of supporting the employment insurance benefits or possibly even social welfare programs that have to support a person who is jobless.
I'm not suggesting at all that everybody is owed a living... I'm suggesting that at the very least, a good reason should exist for being dismissed from any job that a person has had for longer than their probationary period. Of course, this concept is foreign in "at will" employment states.
For what it's worth, not being able to perform the job satisfactorily is a perfectly reasonable grounds for dismissal... although I would think that a company should have an effective enough training program in place to determine this within the first few weeks of employment anyways. If their performance starts to suffer after they have been with the company for a long time, where they had previously always had a satisfactory performance record, then I think the employer has an obligation to inform the employee that they need to improve (ideally in writing, so that there is a paper trail, and the employee should sign such a notice to indicate that they understand the problem and will work to correct it). If the employee shows unwillingness or inability to improve, either because they were not willing to sign such a notice, or if reasonable opportunity is given for improvement after the notice (subjective, but probably not less than a couple of weeks), but none is evident from the employee, then again, it's completely fair to dismiss the incompetent employee.
I don't agree with the above poster that "at will" employment is an actual scam, but I'd certainly agree that it's entirely biased in favor of the employer, and offers an employee absolutely nothing that they don't already have on constitutional grounds.
FTFY
Please say what you mean next time... unless you are genuinely meaning to infer that everyone who knows a particular language must be a "nobody", as in nobody who is important or worthwhile... which is a rather tactless thing to say, if you ask me.
An employer that is terminating someone for reasons that they are explicitly declining to mention because they aren't exactly legal is probably already prepared for that contingency, or else they wouldn't be firing them yet. They would know that the onus is upon the former employee to still prove that the reason is illegal, and if the employer knows he hasn't tipped their hand on that front, then any threat of litigation against him is going to be at the very least only an idle one, and at most simply a waste of money for the former employee. In a nutshell, they could simply ignore it, unless the employee actually does hire a lawyer.
Would "Personal reasons" stand up in court? What about "I don't like him", or "Because I wanted to"?
Would a judge accept "because I wanted to"? Because that's pretty much the same as no reason, as far as I can see.
Employees could quit for any or no reason anyways... even without "at will employment", owing to laws prohibiting slavery. The employer simply has no contractual obligation to someone who quits without notice outside of pay for work already completed.
That's my point... so I don't get why the US bothers to try to make laws like this that are only certain to be found inconvenient by some employers... when those same employers can just fire the employees anyways, and not give any reason for dismissal.