Bill Gates gives less to charity as a percentage of his income than the average American.
Think about that -- the one guy on earth who could totally afford to give away 99.999% of his money and not feel it, and he gives away less of it to charities than the average family struggling to save enough for their kids to (hopefully) go to college...
This is definitely one of the best interviews so far -- it touches on technology, social and legal implications, and even some history.
It's nice to read from someone who doesn't complain, doesn't blame people for anything -- he just says what he'd like to happen, where folks fell short, and how we can step up to the plate.
So of course being cynical, i have to notice that it's kinda like politics -- anyone you'd want to be president is too smart to run for office. Similarly, i guess there's no reason for Woz to WANT to be involved in the daily rat race of tech companies, but it sure would be better for us all if he were.
Has anyone noticed that Woz and Paul Allen, the two "second-string" guys who actually did all the work, are the ones who are out there making the world a better place while Bill and Steve fight over pissing rights? I guess it's like Jimmy carter -- he's the best "ex-president" the country has ever had!...
I guess this is the part where I get lost. I find it hard to believe that any person is INHERENTLY evil (not hitler, or stalin, or even the guys who wake me up doing construction across the street at 7am). Especially a whole group of people with no real biological relationship. What is the cause of the evil? And how do they get through breakfast every day?
I mean, seriously -- how could an inherently evil human being survive? you'd kill your parents as soon as possible, never make any friends, and probably be strangled in your crib for being such a brat.
Certainly people do evil things (although they usually think they're doing good things -- they just turn out to be evil after the fact). The closest thing to an inherently evil person would probably be an amoral person -- one who literally doesn't understand or subscribe to morality, meaning that they just do whatever they want. But even that isn't EVIL, because some of the things they want to do will be good and some will be bad.
So these jewish kids who go to your school, do they kill people on a regular basis or eat babies or something? I would suspect that they probably get nervous giving presentations in front of the class. Probably some of them are popular, some of them aren't. One or two of the girls might even be cute, though the rest are nothing special. Some of them are smarter than the others, some of them are funnier.
I'd suspect they're not all that different from your regular group of white suburban kids, other than the occassional Jewish thing they do together (but Young Life doesn't exactly keep a low profile on most campuses either, so you can hardly single them out for showing religion on occassion).
I think everyone should live in New York City at least once in their life. Seeing so many people working so hard to get by in a city with a hundred languages is pretty interesting. Everyone gets the same embarassed look on their face when they trip on the sidewalk, regardless of where they come from.
It just strikes me as odd that we have to come up with such arbitrary distinctions in order to make an "us" and "them" -- Good lord, we're talking about people who essentially believe in Christianity 1.0. Just because they never upgraded doesn't make 'em evil, it makes them contented users (although God sure did get a lot friendlier in version 2.0, at least in the documentation). And then all the Christians sat around and missed the upgrade to 3.0 courtesy of Mohommad -- what's up with that? Granted, I don't see a lot of compelling new features in the upgrade. 30 days of not eating while the sun is up? We paid for this? give me a resurrection any day, but i can hardly work up the energy to hate a guy just because he refuses to eat pork!...
Jews are like parasites. They enter a country, and they destroy it. They take over the media - they've done this in the US. They're trying to take over the internet, with their filtering software, and by passing "hate speech" laws.
They enact gun control, to make you powerless to stop them
Your own statements are simply blanket condemnations of a religion's followers without any real meaning beyond that you hate jews?
How do jews control the media? ted turner isn't jewish, and he owns about half the damn news companies on the planet, including CNN, which is where everyone on earth gets their news outside the BBC (which isn't owned by jews either). Your statements are illogical.
The truth of the matter is that when Christianity was gaining early popularity with the Romans, the blame for Jesus' death couldn't well be placed where it belonged (at the feet of the Romans themselves, who crucified and tortured him) so it was blamed primarily on the jews.
And since Christian beliefs prohibited usury (or what we might call a "loan" these days) and jews coincidentally were discriminated against for most other jobs, they wound up filling that professional void and getting the lovely reputation of greed (not that the christians weren't happy to borrow money from them when necessary).
The history of judaism is, as you describe it, one of persecution. not because of any evil intrinsic in them, but because those who are "different" make convenient places for the blame of our communal shortcomings. if the economy isn't working out, blame the jews and the gypsies and the queers. Why not? -- we've got them outnumbered!...
Actually, legal positions at organizations like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center are incredibly difficult to get. The competition among law students for these $10/hour jobs is fierce... so it isn't just megacorporations that have access to the best legal talent.
Exactly -- there's no shortage of attorneys with ideals, they just don't make slashdot (or the news) as often.
A similar thing for doctors -- there is a waiting list for Doctors Without Borders, and international free care organization where you go to the shittiest places on earth to cure the most stomach-turning stuff you could imagine. And the doctors don't get $10 and hour -- they pay upwards of $30k a year for the privlege of volunteering.
While I see everyone is having a field day with the obvious "reading it for the articles" jokes, I do have a serious comment/question.
"Corel touts its product as a version for the end user and plans to package it with many of its other products, such as PageMaker,CorelDRAW, QuattroPro and Paradox."
I assume this is a mistake, since pagemaker isn't available for Linux, and Corel doesn't distribute it anyways. But what was she talking about? Did she mean FrameMaker? even that isn't out yet (AFAIK) and it still wouldn't be a Corel product.
I don't have a Corel CD, so what's the deal? Is corel going to be distributing FrameMaker/LINUX for/with Adobe, or is this confused or am I confused?...
I'll swear -- one of the great things about Playboy writers is that they don't have to worry about censorship. piss off anyone you want, the advertisers are already known to not cave in to pressure from boycotts and other special interests.
So they tend to be more willing to speak their mind. have you ever read the section on factiods (or whatever it's called?) where they tell you things like "In afghanistan, a woman can't have sex with a sheep unless they're legally married" and "a new study by the university of chicago revealed that over 27% of men prefer smoking a cigar to having sex with their own wives, while wives were 80% more likely to prefer watching a sad movie".
OTOH law works, most of the time, and it has to cover a lot of subjects noone even thought of a few years ago (while i still think it could work better, if it where less subject to the influence of lobbyists)! Probably in most cases it's apparent 'complicatedness' just reflects that life isn't always simple.
that's probably the most sensible statement I've seen in this whole thread. You're absolutely correct that the law is so complicated because life is that way too.
It would be like programming an application that had to run on any operating system (including ones that haven't been written yet), with any combination of hardware (including hardware that hasn't been invented yet), that verified every piece of data (including data formats that aren't known of yet), and never returned an error.
Of course you'd build as robust a central system as you could, and give it one hell of a plug-in architecture to accomidate all those changes you know will come. now I don't know how smart everyone on Slashdot really is, but somehow I doubt that the program we write would work half as well over the next few centuries as the european/american legal systems have over the past few.
See another thread for more info on the mcdonalds coffee suit -- I'll only say that you don't seem to know anything about it beyond what you heard on the 11 oclock news or from a "friend of a friend".
But regardless, it is only these anecdotal examples, and not the tens of thousands of legal cases that are conducted without fanfare, that folks here are relying on to condemn the legal profession.
By the tone of these discussions, you would think that every tech project was successful, on time, and under budget...
For example, while we see a single-page "Table of Contents" in literature as something completely unpatentable
Only in retrospect.
It took over a hundred years for the Table of Contents to catch on as a standard part of a book. It was very clearly one of those truly ingenious, useful, and wholly inventive ideas that change the world.
Next you'll tell us that the wheel was obvious and not novel, too?...
A few more interesting facts about that case -- the woman didn't ask for that money in the first place. The jury was so appaled by McD's behavior in and out of the courtroom that they awarded the punitive damages.
The award wasn't made -- the judge reduced it on appeal, as most large awars are. This is the real efficiency of the justice system -- the jury got to show how pissed off the "common man" was, and the judge got to put in some judicial restraint.
And if you want coffee so hot that its physically impossible to drink without burning yourself (which was the case with McD's) I guess you'll have to make it yourself. Similarly, if you want a car that blows up, the pinto isn't available. And if you want a plane that falls out of the sky unexpectedly, you'll have to look away from those that have already done so. It's truly a shame how the courts take away such fundamental choices...
Then i guess I'm not understanding your point -- how do you differentiate between techies who have to work to put food on the table (but somehow remain uncorrupted by the money of corporations) and lawyers (who are corrupted)?
What i was trying to say earlier is that while many in the "techie" world have an idealistic view of things, so do many lawyers. And while many lawyers have been subjugated by the top dollars of giant megacorps, others are perfectly happy to work for the DA's office or the local poverty law group.
Seriously, how many techies/geeks do you really think will turn down a million dollars to work for megacorp? is being technically inclined any more inherently altruistic than being legally inclined? For every hacker who toils away in the basement working on a kernel patch for free, I can show you a lawyer who advises low-income people on how to start their own company for free. And given the recent IPO-madness, I'll bet the lawyer has a lesser chance of ever capitalizing on that donation.
However, given that the best money buys the best lawyer
Where is this written in stone? Surely the ACLU has a few good lawyers, considering the number of cases they win. And they sure don't pay as well as Smith-Barney.
And the Justice department seems to be doing okay with the small amount they're paying to fight Microsoft, especially considering that MS's legal costs have been estimated to be over a hundred million.
And, given that you generally CAN buy a better lawyer for more money, isn't the same true of techies? if Sun offers you more than Netscape, isn't the average geek gonna jump ship for the money? That's what I've seen in most of the companies I've been at (and in my own behavior *cough*).
We're even bigger sluts than lawyers or doctors nowadays -- offer us a few dollars more and we'll jump ship in a heartbeat...
I think that 80% of lawsuits are futile and a waste of the courts time
I think 80% of the lawsuits filed get settled out of court, and thus don't cost the taxpayers or the court very much at all. Actually, the figure is much higher than 80%.
Of the small percentage of suits that go to court, the vast majority are dispatched in a matter of hours at most.
Of the absurdly small number of cases that make it to the 11 o'clock news that you hear about, very well 80% of them may be a waste. But don't presume that they are representative of the cases the courts deal with every day.
Lawyers are dominated and work for a world of Governments and large business interests. They have to legislate for a practical business world and not for technological utopias and moral principles in application.
A great many of the liberties you cherish today have been fought for and won by idealistic lawyers guided by moral principles in seeking utopia.
Visit any law school and you'll find a lot more people who want to fight before the supreme court for truth and justice than you might suspect.
Most lawyers don't dream about serving giant corporations any more than most techies dream about working 3rd-shift network support. But sometimes putting food on the table gets in the way of your idealistic dreams, regardless of your profession.
I think the real issue is that tech-type people (generally) like to deal with reality as we see it. We tend to look at the law as though it ought to make some sort of objective sense. It doesn't, and it's not going to
You obviously don't know much about the law other than what you read about on slashdot or hear on the 11 oclock news.
The law reflects the "real world" quite perfectly -- it is built on REAL cases with REAL people in REAL conflict. At the end of a conflict we have a decision to guide us better for another future conflict. After a few hundred years of this, we get to the point of having a legal history that shows every idiotic, greedy, stupid, and brilliant moment of human activity for that time.
laws change and adapt as necessary becuase the real world changes. Sometimes the law is ahead of human progress (as it was at the time of the US Constitution, where most of the ideals remained unenforceable for some time) and other times it's a little behind (as the time of gutenberg, when inventions and publications were ripped off by unscrupulous folks not unlike current domain squatters).
Amazingly enough, the same general principles of common sense have guided the legal systems of most countries the majority of the time, and successfully at that.
So while you may dismiss those who know and love law while embracing those who know and love technology, I can assure you that a high-grade legal discussion would be just as over your head as a high-grade technical discussion would be over most lawyers'...
I think the problem is that you haven't found the root of the problem. The root being that the laws can't keep up with the technology
That's preposterous -- it's the same argument Microsoft and every other company makes when they get in trouble "the laws don't cover THIS situation, it's unique!"
I know we all love to think that we're smarter than everyone else, that NO ONE could possibly understand the implications of what we do, but its just not true. Most laws on the books fit technology just fine, technology only changes some of the details of the process or argument.
Tell me, what about having a pentium 3 700mhz in your computer in 2000 makes a crime more or less criminal than back in the day when you did it with a ledger book?
I just don't buy that the folks on slashdot know everything about everything, including constitutional law and every precedent set down from the time of the magna carta.
I am still struck by the conflict that although he worked for peace, he was a soldier - and soldiers are trained to kill other human beings to forward whatever political agenda is on the table
Maybe bad soldiers, but not good ones. Good soldiers are taught to WIN, not to kill. There's a big difference, and that's one point Brin was making -- that despite being a "killer", Marshall instituted some of the most generously peaceful actions of the century, in hopes that they would PREVENT wars and killing in the future.
Despite the popular characterization of the military, most generals are more likely to be considered "wimps" by barroom standards. They tend to spend a lot of time reading philosophy texts and other boring things like that.
Marshall would have been very familiar with the following notion:
to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting - Sun Tzu
You speak as if there has always been sales tax, or tax of any sort. Mississippi was the first state to enact a general sales and use tax. It did so in 1932 as a depression-era response to declining revenue from other sources, especially property taxes
Movie previews are done in quicktime/sorensen because it is flat-out the absolute best, highest quality-high-compression video format available. If sorensen made their codec available for other formats (like avi) people wouldn't stick to quicktime as much. I believe apple and sorensen have a very exclusive deal at the moment, though.
Premiere won't use multiple processors in any real sense. You can have it use 100% of one processor and set the OS to use the other, but that's as good as it gets.
Some plug-ins and extended versions will make use of the "other" processor than the one the main app is using, which can help a lot depending on what plug-ins/filters you're using, but just re-encoding from one format to another won't get any boost.
Does anyone know if Media Cleaner Pro uses multiple processors? I don't think so, but if it did that would make it immensely useful for this sort of thing...
This isn't skepticism, this is dismissal -- "they're not ill, they're nuts". I personally found the titling of the article to be pretty insensitive. Could you imagine an article with the headline "Doctors Say Cancer Kills Losers"?...
I find it odd that in this place (/.) where we so frequently complain about being outcast or stigmatized by our peers, so many of the comments here are willing to do the same for those with mental problems.
This report is not talking about druggin people, or profiling those who are different, it's saying that we need to genuinely help those who need it and try to remove the social stigma from admitting you have a problem.
Think about it -- If I had cancer, everyone would be sympathetic. If I had a severe depressive disorder, people would stay as far away as possible. Why? It's right in the title of this story -- so offensively claiming you're "nuts"...
My brother-in-law runs a municipal water supply, so I can answer some of your issues based on ym conversations with him and his work schedule.
First off, SOMEONE will be available at midnight new years if something goes wrong -- water is too valuable a resource, and the technicians, as well as other staff, have a regular rotating call schedule (24/7) like any hospital.
Flexible hours are what attract some people to the job, so being on a saturday doesn't mean they have two days off (someone is running the station on a saturday and sunday, too!).
Second, everything has a mechanical override -- again, water is too valuable to trust entirely to automated systems. There are plenty of people who know how to run the override systems.
granted, this is all for a municipality of a few hundred thousand (maybe a million, but less than two) so large cities like NYC will have much more automation dependency...
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates gives less to charity as a percentage of his income than the average American.
Think about that -- the one guy on earth who could totally afford to give away 99.999% of his money and not feel it, and he gives away less of it to charities than the average family struggling to save enough for their kids to (hopefully) go to college...
This is definitely one of the best interviews so far -- it touches on technology, social and legal implications, and even some history.
It's nice to read from someone who doesn't complain, doesn't blame people for anything -- he just says what he'd like to happen, where folks fell short, and how we can step up to the plate.
So of course being cynical, i have to notice that it's kinda like politics -- anyone you'd want to be president is too smart to run for office. Similarly, i guess there's no reason for Woz to WANT to be involved in the daily rat race of tech companies, but it sure would be better for us all if he were.
Has anyone noticed that Woz and Paul Allen, the two "second-string" guys who actually did all the work, are the ones who are out there making the world a better place while Bill and Steve fight over pissing rights? I guess it's like Jimmy carter -- he's the best "ex-president" the country has ever had!...
They are intrinsically evil
I guess this is the part where I get lost. I find it hard to believe that any person is INHERENTLY evil (not hitler, or stalin, or even the guys who wake me up doing construction across the street at 7am). Especially a whole group of people with no real biological relationship. What is the cause of the evil? And how do they get through breakfast every day?
I mean, seriously -- how could an inherently evil human being survive? you'd kill your parents as soon as possible, never make any friends, and probably be strangled in your crib for being such a brat.
Certainly people do evil things (although they usually think they're doing good things -- they just turn out to be evil after the fact). The closest thing to an inherently evil person would probably be an amoral person -- one who literally doesn't understand or subscribe to morality, meaning that they just do whatever they want. But even that isn't EVIL, because some of the things they want to do will be good and some will be bad.
So these jewish kids who go to your school, do they kill people on a regular basis or eat babies or something? I would suspect that they probably get nervous giving presentations in front of the class. Probably some of them are popular, some of them aren't. One or two of the girls might even be cute, though the rest are nothing special. Some of them are smarter than the others, some of them are funnier.
I'd suspect they're not all that different from your regular group of white suburban kids, other than the occassional Jewish thing they do together (but Young Life doesn't exactly keep a low profile on most campuses either, so you can hardly single them out for showing religion on occassion).
I think everyone should live in New York City at least once in their life. Seeing so many people working so hard to get by in a city with a hundred languages is pretty interesting. Everyone gets the same embarassed look on their face when they trip on the sidewalk, regardless of where they come from.
It just strikes me as odd that we have to come up with such arbitrary distinctions in order to make an "us" and "them" -- Good lord, we're talking about people who essentially believe in Christianity 1.0. Just because they never upgraded doesn't make 'em evil, it makes them contented users (although God sure did get a lot friendlier in version 2.0, at least in the documentation). And then all the Christians sat around and missed the upgrade to 3.0 courtesy of Mohommad -- what's up with that? Granted, I don't see a lot of compelling new features in the upgrade. 30 days of not eating while the sun is up? We paid for this? give me a resurrection any day, but i can hardly work up the energy to hate a guy just because he refuses to eat pork!...
have a reasonable debate with me
how is this possible when:
Jews are like parasites. They enter a country, and they destroy it. They take over the media - they've done this in the US. They're trying to take over the internet, with their filtering software, and by passing "hate speech" laws.
They enact gun control, to make you powerless to stop them
Your own statements are simply blanket condemnations of a religion's followers without any real meaning beyond that you hate jews?
How do jews control the media? ted turner isn't jewish, and he owns about half the damn news companies on the planet, including CNN, which is where everyone on earth gets their news outside the BBC (which isn't owned by jews either). Your statements are illogical.
The truth of the matter is that when Christianity was gaining early popularity with the Romans, the blame for Jesus' death couldn't well be placed where it belonged (at the feet of the Romans themselves, who crucified and tortured him) so it was blamed primarily on the jews.
And since Christian beliefs prohibited usury (or what we might call a "loan" these days) and jews coincidentally were discriminated against for most other jobs, they wound up filling that professional void and getting the lovely reputation of greed (not that the christians weren't happy to borrow money from them when necessary).
The history of judaism is, as you describe it, one of persecution. not because of any evil intrinsic in them, but because those who are "different" make convenient places for the blame of our communal shortcomings. if the economy isn't working out, blame the jews and the gypsies and the queers. Why not? -- we've got them outnumbered!...
Actually, legal positions at organizations like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center are incredibly difficult to get. The
competition among law students for these $10/hour jobs is fierce... so it isn't just megacorporations that have access to the best
legal talent.
Exactly -- there's no shortage of attorneys with ideals, they just don't make slashdot (or the news) as often.
A similar thing for doctors -- there is a waiting list for Doctors Without Borders, and international free care organization where you go to the shittiest places on earth to cure the most stomach-turning stuff you could imagine. And the doctors don't get $10 and hour -- they pay upwards of $30k a year for the privlege of volunteering.
While I see everyone is having a field day with the obvious "reading it for the articles" jokes, I do have a serious comment/question.
"Corel touts its product as a version for the end user and plans to package it with many of its other products, such as PageMaker,CorelDRAW, QuattroPro and Paradox."
I assume this is a mistake, since pagemaker isn't available for Linux, and Corel doesn't distribute it anyways. But what was she talking about? Did she mean FrameMaker? even that isn't out yet (AFAIK) and it still wouldn't be a Corel product.
I don't have a Corel CD, so what's the deal? Is corel going to be distributing FrameMaker/LINUX for/with Adobe, or is this confused or am I confused?...
I'll swear -- one of the great things about Playboy writers is that they don't have to worry about censorship. piss off anyone you want, the advertisers are already known to not cave in to pressure from boycotts and other special interests.
So they tend to be more willing to speak their mind. have you ever read the section on factiods (or whatever it's called?) where they tell you things like "In afghanistan, a woman can't have sex with a sheep unless they're legally married" and "a new study by the university of chicago revealed that over 27% of men prefer smoking a cigar to having sex with their own wives, while wives were 80% more likely to prefer watching a sad movie".
that's stuff you don't get in USA Today!
OTOH law works, most of the time, and it has to cover a lot of subjects noone even thought of a few years ago (while i still
think it could work better, if it where less subject to the influence of lobbyists)! Probably in most cases it's apparent
'complicatedness' just reflects that life isn't always simple.
that's probably the most sensible statement I've seen in this whole thread. You're absolutely correct that the law is so complicated because life is that way too.
It would be like programming an application that had to run on any operating system (including ones that haven't been written yet), with any combination of hardware (including hardware that hasn't been invented yet), that verified every piece of data (including data formats that aren't known of yet), and never returned an error.
Of course you'd build as robust a central system as you could, and give it one hell of a plug-in architecture to accomidate all those changes you know will come. now I don't know how smart everyone on Slashdot really is, but somehow I doubt that the program we write would work half as well over the next few centuries as the european/american legal systems have over the past few.
See another thread for more info on the mcdonalds coffee suit -- I'll only say that you don't seem to know anything about it beyond what you heard on the 11 oclock news or from a "friend of a friend".
But regardless, it is only these anecdotal examples, and not the tens of thousands of legal cases that are conducted without fanfare, that folks here are relying on to condemn the legal profession.
By the tone of these discussions, you would think that every tech project was successful, on time, and under budget...
For example, while we see a single-page "Table of Contents" in literature as something completely unpatentable
Only in retrospect.
It took over a hundred years for the Table of Contents to catch on as a standard part of a book.
It was very clearly one of those truly ingenious, useful, and wholly inventive ideas that change the world.
Next you'll tell us that the wheel was obvious and not novel, too?...
A few more interesting facts about that case --
the woman didn't ask for that money in the first place. The jury was so appaled by McD's behavior in and out of the courtroom that they awarded the punitive damages.
The award wasn't made -- the judge reduced it on appeal, as most large awars are. This is the real efficiency of the justice system -- the jury got to show how pissed off the "common man" was, and the judge got to put in some judicial restraint.
And if you want coffee so hot that its physically impossible to drink without burning yourself (which was the case with McD's) I guess you'll have to make it yourself. Similarly, if you want a car that blows up, the pinto isn't available. And if you want a plane that falls out of the sky unexpectedly, you'll have to look away from those that have already done so. It's truly a shame how the courts take away such fundamental choices...
Then i guess I'm not understanding your point -- how do you differentiate between techies who have to work to put food on the table (but somehow remain uncorrupted by the money of corporations) and lawyers (who are corrupted)?
What i was trying to say earlier is that while many in the "techie" world have an idealistic view of things, so do many lawyers. And while many lawyers have been subjugated by the top dollars of giant megacorps, others are perfectly happy to work for the DA's office or the local poverty law group.
Seriously, how many techies/geeks do you really think will turn down a million dollars to work for megacorp? is being technically inclined any more inherently altruistic than being legally inclined?
For every hacker who toils away in the basement working on a kernel patch for free, I can show you a lawyer who advises low-income people on how to start their own company for free. And given the recent IPO-madness, I'll bet the lawyer has a lesser chance of ever capitalizing on that donation.
However, given that the best money buys the best lawyer
Where is this written in stone? Surely the ACLU has a few good lawyers, considering the number of cases they win. And they sure don't pay as well as Smith-Barney.
And the Justice department seems to be doing okay with the small amount they're paying to fight Microsoft, especially considering that MS's legal costs have been estimated to be over a hundred million.
And, given that you generally CAN buy a better lawyer for more money, isn't the same true of techies? if Sun offers you more than Netscape, isn't the average geek gonna jump ship for the money? That's what I've seen in most of the companies I've been at (and in my own behavior *cough*).
We're even bigger sluts than lawyers or doctors nowadays -- offer us a few dollars more and we'll jump ship in a heartbeat...
I think that 80% of lawsuits are futile and a waste of the courts time
I think 80% of the lawsuits filed get settled out of court, and thus don't cost the taxpayers or the court very much at all. Actually, the figure is much higher than 80%.
Of the small percentage of suits that go to court, the vast majority are dispatched in a matter of hours at most.
Of the absurdly small number of cases that make it to the 11 o'clock news that you hear about, very well 80% of them may be a waste. But don't presume that they are representative of the cases the courts deal with every day.
Lawyers are dominated and work for a world of Governments and large business
interests. They have to legislate for a practical business world and not for technological utopias and moral principles in
application.
A great many of the liberties you cherish today have been fought for and won by idealistic lawyers guided by moral principles in seeking utopia.
Visit any law school and you'll find a lot more people who want to fight before the supreme court for truth and justice than you might suspect.
Most lawyers don't dream about serving giant corporations any more than most techies dream about working 3rd-shift network support. But sometimes putting food on the table gets in the way of your idealistic dreams, regardless of your profession.
I think the real issue is that tech-type people (generally) like to deal with reality as we see it. We tend to look at the law as
though it ought to make some sort of objective sense. It doesn't, and it's not going to
You obviously don't know much about the law other than what you read about on slashdot or hear on the 11 oclock news.
The law reflects the "real world" quite perfectly -- it is built on REAL cases with REAL people in REAL conflict. At the end of a conflict we have a decision to guide us better for another future conflict. After a few hundred years of this, we get to the point of having a legal history that shows every idiotic, greedy, stupid, and brilliant moment of human activity for that time.
laws change and adapt as necessary becuase the real world changes. Sometimes the law is ahead of human progress (as it was at the time of the US Constitution, where most of the ideals remained unenforceable for some time) and other times it's a little behind (as the time of gutenberg, when inventions and publications were ripped off by unscrupulous folks not unlike current domain squatters).
Amazingly enough, the same general principles of common sense have guided the legal systems of most countries the majority of the time, and successfully at that.
So while you may dismiss those who know and love law while embracing those who know and love technology, I can assure you that a high-grade legal discussion would be just as over your head as a high-grade technical discussion would be over most lawyers'...
I think the problem is that you haven't found the root of the problem. The root being that the laws can't keep up with the
technology
That's preposterous -- it's the same argument Microsoft and every other company makes when they get in trouble "the laws don't cover THIS situation, it's unique!"
I know we all love to think that we're smarter than everyone else, that NO ONE could possibly understand the implications of what we do, but its just not true. Most laws on the books fit technology just fine, technology only changes some of the details of the process or argument.
Tell me, what about having a pentium 3 700mhz in your computer in 2000 makes a crime more or less criminal than back in the day when you did it with a ledger book?
I just don't buy that the folks on slashdot know everything about everything, including constitutional law and every precedent set down from the time of the magna carta.
Sounds like a winner to me!
But of course, PT Barnum will still have his say at the IPO, and I certainly wouldn't turn down some shares...
I am still struck by the conflict that although he worked for peace, he was a soldier - and soldiers are trained to kill other human beings to forward whatever political agenda is on the table
Maybe bad soldiers, but not good ones. Good soldiers are taught to WIN, not to kill. There's a big difference, and that's one point Brin was making -- that despite being a "killer", Marshall instituted some of the most generously peaceful actions of the century, in hopes that they would PREVENT wars and killing in the future.
Despite the popular characterization of the military, most generals are more likely to be considered "wimps" by barroom standards. They tend to spend a lot of time reading philosophy texts and other boring things like that.
Marshall would have been very familiar with the following notion:
to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting - Sun Tzu
You speak as if there has always been sales tax, or tax of any sort.
Mississippi was the first state to enact a general sales and use tax. It did so in 1932 as a depression-era response to
declining revenue from other sources, especially property taxes
So a property tax isn't a tax?
It's the highest quality regardless of who is limited to seeing it.
That's like saying Imax isn't higher quality than regular movie films just because you have to go to an Imax theater to see it.
Movie previews are done in quicktime/sorensen because it is flat-out the absolute best, highest quality-high-compression video format available. If sorensen made their codec available for other formats (like avi) people wouldn't stick to quicktime as much. I believe apple and sorensen have a very exclusive deal at the moment, though.
Premiere won't use multiple processors in any real sense. You can have it use 100% of one processor and set the OS to use the other, but that's as good as it gets.
Some plug-ins and extended versions will make use of the "other" processor than the one the main app is using, which can help a lot depending on what plug-ins/filters you're using, but just re-encoding from one format to another won't get any boost.
Does anyone know if Media Cleaner Pro uses multiple processors? I don't think so, but if it did that would make it immensely useful for this sort of thing...
This isn't skepticism, this is dismissal -- "they're not ill, they're nuts". I personally found the titling of the article to be pretty insensitive. Could you imagine an article with the headline "Doctors Say Cancer Kills Losers"?...
I find it odd that in this place (/.) where we so frequently complain about being outcast or stigmatized by our peers, so many of the comments here are willing to do the same for those with mental problems.
This report is not talking about druggin people, or profiling those who are different, it's saying that we need to genuinely help those who need it and try to remove the social stigma from admitting you have a problem.
Think about it -- If I had cancer, everyone would be sympathetic. If I had a severe depressive disorder, people would stay as far away as possible. Why? It's right in the title of this story -- so offensively claiming you're "nuts"...
My brother-in-law runs a municipal water supply, so I can answer some of your issues based on ym conversations with him and his work schedule.
First off, SOMEONE will be available at midnight new years if something goes wrong -- water is too valuable a resource, and the technicians, as well as other staff, have a regular rotating call schedule (24/7) like any hospital.
Flexible hours are what attract some people to the job, so being on a saturday doesn't mean they have two days off (someone is running the station on a saturday and sunday, too!).
Second, everything has a mechanical override -- again, water is too valuable to trust entirely to automated systems. There are plenty of people who know how to run the override systems.
granted, this is all for a municipality of a few hundred thousand (maybe a million, but less than two) so large cities like NYC will have much more automation dependency...