Well, the thing about the Yellowstone "super-volcano" is that it will take out most of the central US and do severe damage to the coastal areas if it goes the way it did last time.
It's quite difficult to FIND a place that isn't exposed to some danger or other. Sometimes it's relatively easy to predict when it will happen (withing a decade or so) and other times it's more difficult.
Now in this particular place, there was clear evidence that the timeline was rather short, and it's quite likely that the people who bought the houses had no idea of the danger. And that the people who buy the houses now being built will have no idea of the danger. (If the people who are currently recovering from the mudslide are rebuilding, the government should prohibit resale without explicit disclosures and a contractually binding warning that the government won't give any assistance next time. If the houses are sold without the warning being passed on with a signed acceptance of danger and another signed waiver of government assistance, and another signed agreement to pass the same warning and requirements on to the next purchaser...and the whole package bound into the validity of the title, so that it will turn up during a title search, then they should be criminally liable for fraud and reckless endangerment. If this is a company or corporation, then the criminal charges should apply to all members of the board of directors and to all management personnel.
Do I think it will happen that way...no. But that's what would be the most just response. Perhaps there should be government assistance to relocate any people currently living there.
P.S.: Just refusing all building permits might be a good enough answer. But you'd need something done to ensure that the denial of all building permits in that area was maintained, and that's difficult.
Do you really think the US is the only country? Various different countries have various different requuirements about how users need to be supported. The ADA is only one magic wand.
Please note that that's an OLD proverb. At the time it was new every craftsman was expected to *make* his tools.
Times changed, the proverb didn't. Now the good craftsman selects most of his tools, and only makes a very few specialty items. You could still judge his quality by the quality of those tools, and the skill with which he weilded them. If he blamed them, you would know that he was blaming himself.
Now consider someone working in a normal environment where he is not allowed to select the tools that he uses. In that case, blaming the tools can be quite reasonable. There really are many quite inferior tools out there.
Now in this case we're considering a craftsman who is contemplating how he could improve the design of a tool that he both uses and designed. He's unhappy with it, and is contemplating how he could improve the design, so he's criticizing it. Applying the proverb here, even though it is really applicable, is missing the point. He's trying to design a better tool. (I may be dubious about his chances, but that's a separate issue.)
But you could sue them again for every time they "distributed" it after being notified.
I suspect that the code is clean in one of two ways: 1) Portions were never under the GPL, and 2) Portions were written by the entity that sold them (was sold) to Google. There is also likely a "de minimis" amount of code that is unclean, and is also not "functionally required", and thus coverable by copyright law. Being "de minimis" (i.e. minimal in quantity) it will probably be officially forgiven by the court system.
N.B.: This is suspcion, not knowledge. But Google has a lot of experience with GPL code, and usually plays it straight. Being under the GPL doesn't automatically mean it must be public. That's true only if the author insists AND it is publicly distributed.
P.S.: I suspect that much of this code is never distributed by Google, and the GPL is not the AGPL, so server side code doesn't need to be distributed, even if it is covered.
FWIW, a decade or so there was a story about UC med center sending it's records to a firm in Texas to by typed into the computer, which sub-contracted it to a firm in Florida, which outsourced it to a firm in India, which outsourced it to a firm in Pakistan. It only came to light because the Indian firm gypped the Pakistani firm and refused to pay them, so the Pakistani firm (actually, I believe it was a one-woman operation) refused to return the records, and sought to sell the information on-line. I didn't hear of anybody facing criminal charges, or even law suits. (I think the Florida firm had gone bankrupt, though it might have been the one in Texas.)
So the medical practitioner might not have sold the records, but it didn't make much difference. And HIPPA doesn't seem to keep any medical groups from using MSWind computers connected to the internet. So whether for-profit or non-profit, if you ship information out, it cannot be guaranteed secure. SOME activities may be legally prohibited, but they laws are only very laxly enforced, and many activities that expose the information aren't even forbidden.
If I understand the legal system correctly, if you communicate something to anyone who isn't in an attorney-client relationship with you, the authorities will claim that it is no longer private information, even if the other party is contractually obligated to not release it. And the authorities will usually be supported by the courts...or just not let the matter come to trial.
Do I believe that this is correct? No. Do I believe that this is what the laws meant at the time they were written? No. But I do believe this is how they are being enforced by those with power today.
How are you going to rertroactively kill them? Or are you claiming that because they would have rather have died prior to some experiences that they have had, that, having endured them, they now want to die anyway? But the enduring is a sunk cost, so if that's what you mean, your argument is fallacious.
Define your terms. Do it in such a way that an existence proof for a soul is possible. (Or, failing that, that it is possible to prove the absence of a soul, though that is distinctly inferior.)
14th problem in the same series: Justify refusing to kill something which has an immortal soul, while being willing to kill something which does not. (This one is a paraphrase from Voltaire.)
That's what they say. Why do you believe them? They are obviously a bunch of criminals attempting to cover their asses.
(N.B.: I'm not claiming it isn't true, I'm claiming that in context there is no reason to believe them. It sounds like the kind of lie they would invent to be a cover story, and no proof is offered. AND even if so it wouldn't justify their actions.)
You wear strange glasses. Most people I know criticize the president and the rest of the admininstration. They'v e even pretty much stopped saying "Well, they're well intentioned." And I'm talking about generally liberal people here. (Yes, I do know some who criticize the adminstration for not being conservative enough, for some definition or other of conservative, but I think of most of them as dingbats.)
Have they solve the problem of Hydrogen leaking rapidly through every thin membrane? Perhaps aluminized mylar would be impermeable? (That's a wild guess. I've done *NO* research. But it *would* be flashy.)
For that matter, copyright doesn't cover functionally required material. So copyright can't touch it...if you have a good lawyer. Patents, however, and trademarks, are totally different categories of law. Both are applicable, though in this case I don't think there could be any claim made by the person distributing the GPL code. But someone you've never heard of may hold a trademark that it could be ruled to be infringing. And there's NO reasonable protection from patents. Even a good lawyer, a clear case, and a fat wad of cash isn't a guarantee.
Well, much of the open source community got its start when ESR got upset that he couldn't make a proprietary printer driver do what he wanted it to. Perhaps you should look at your question again. You may still decide that it's reasonable that a corp should decide what capabilities the hardware it sold you should make available, but you also might change your mind.
That's not what Object programming considers an object. It would be more like: "A struct and all the functions that use it as the first argument" depending on the language. Some languages would have it be a pointer to the above. One of the critical aspects of an object is that is has a local scope for each instance. In C this either means you are holding it on the stack, or you've done a malloc.
That said, you can definitely do object programming in C. Existence proof is offered by valac -C which takes Vala code and emits a C equivalent. (It uses the GObject protocol to do so.) Mind you, the code that it emits is nearly unreadable, but it *is* object programming in C.
It's definitely true that a lot of the problem can be explained by things being built in places that they shouldn't be. That's also clearly not the whole story.
Still, I don't know how I'd approportion the "blame". Sometimes you need both to happen before there's a disaster, sometimes one alone suffices. Sometimes even both together don't yield a disaster. Weather is chaotic. So is climate, though the scale is different. But even in chaos there are attractors. You don't often get snow in June (North of the Equator), unless you are on a really high mountain.
Anyone who tries to deny climate change, as in global warming (which doesn't meant warming in every locale), is either blindly prejudiced, lying, or just unwilling to look at the evidence.
In organizations where there is not a lot of publicity driven voting with funding from biased sources that should work fairly well, but that doesn't describe the US political system. Even so it should act to moderate the extremism. But note that that system is hardly describable as "plurality wins".
Even so, to me it looks as if the system that you have proposed will act so as to maintain and increase the concentration of wealth and power among those that already have it, and squeeze out those on the edges of power. This isn't something that I consider healthy in a society.
To me it seems quite clear that WB acted in extremely bad faith with malice aforethought. It is not so clear that a good lawyer couldn't argue against an underfunded lawyer that they technically met their promise. But that doesn't mean that it's not quite resaonable to bad-mouth them, and let everyone else know how you feel about them.
FWIW, I have refused to purchase or support friends purchasing over paying to view movies, or other merchandise from any MPAA or RIAA member company for over a decade, so I am not an unbiased observer. My evaluation of their behavior may be subject to confirmation bias. But I feel this is their current implementation of "Never give a sucker an even break.".
There's nothing that they could do that would satisfy everyone, and so what. If the government were honorable, trustworthy, and could be depended to stay that way then they could adopt policies that would convince all reasonable people of their good intentions.
Since the initial conditions cannot be met, however, they probably can't convince anyone who doesn't blindly want to believe them. And rightly so.
No company in the US can be trusted to honor promises to keep your secret from the government. None. No matter what they say.
A reasonable question is "How many other countries are any better?", and I must admit that I don't know of any. But that doesn't mean that it is reasonable to trust a US corporation.
Why does it seem far fetched? I don't know that it's true, but I certainly don't find it unlikely. IBM was born out of the US Census (among other factors), and has always had strong ties to the federal government.
Sorry, but no. It's a system designs problem...except that those in power don't see it as a problem.
The basic problem is that the election process is plurality wins rather than majority wins. This ensures that the winner will be one of no more than two major parties when the system is in a stable or quasi-stable state. Third parties have essentially no chance. This is unlike a majority wins election where you have either multiple rounds of voting, or you condense the multiple rounds via some sort of ranking system. Condorcet is my favorite of these, but Instant Runoff Voting is nearly as good and is much easier to explain.
FWIW, it can be mathematically proven that there is no electoral system that will come to a fair decision in all cases (where fair means that most of the voters agree with the decision), but plurality wins is the worst of the five systems included in the study (which also included Condorcet and Instant Runoff).
Actually, I believe that a lottery would be far superior to the current system, if the pool of qualified candidates were large enough. A large part of the problem is that in major elections both of the plausible winners have incurred political debts to supporters that they are obligated to pay off. A lottery will usually select someone who has the popular opinion on most issues. And we've already had some real winners winning elections. (A late stage altzheimers patient was one of the most popular presidents, believe it if you can.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the thing about the Yellowstone "super-volcano" is that it will take out most of the central US and do severe damage to the coastal areas if it goes the way it did last time.
It's quite difficult to FIND a place that isn't exposed to some danger or other. Sometimes it's relatively easy to predict when it will happen (withing a decade or so) and other times it's more difficult.
Now in this particular place, there was clear evidence that the timeline was rather short, and it's quite likely that the people who bought the houses had no idea of the danger. And that the people who buy the houses now being built will have no idea of the danger. (If the people who are currently recovering from the mudslide are rebuilding, the government should prohibit resale without explicit disclosures and a contractually binding warning that the government won't give any assistance next time. If the houses are sold without the warning being passed on with a signed acceptance of danger and another signed waiver of government assistance, and another signed agreement to pass the same warning and requirements on to the next purchaser ...and the whole package bound into the validity of the title, so that it will turn up during a title search, then they should be criminally liable for fraud and reckless endangerment. If this is a company or corporation, then the criminal charges should apply to all members of the board of directors and to all management personnel.
Do I think it will happen that way...no. But that's what would be the most just response. Perhaps there should be government assistance to relocate any people currently living there.
P.S.: Just refusing all building permits might be a good enough answer. But you'd need something done to ensure that the denial of all building permits in that area was maintained, and that's difficult.
Do you really think the US is the only country? Various different countries have various different requuirements about how users need to be supported. The ADA is only one magic wand.
Please note that that's an OLD proverb. At the time it was new every craftsman was expected to *make* his tools.
Times changed, the proverb didn't. Now the good craftsman selects most of his tools, and only makes a very few specialty items. You could still judge his quality by the quality of those tools, and the skill with which he weilded them. If he blamed them, you would know that he was blaming himself.
Now consider someone working in a normal environment where he is not allowed to select the tools that he uses. In that case, blaming the tools can be quite reasonable. There really are many quite inferior tools out there.
Now in this case we're considering a craftsman who is contemplating how he could improve the design of a tool that he both uses and designed. He's unhappy with it, and is contemplating how he could improve the design, so he's criticizing it. Applying the proverb here, even though it is really applicable, is missing the point. He's trying to design a better tool. (I may be dubious about his chances, but that's a separate issue.)
But you could sue them again for every time they "distributed" it after being notified.
I suspect that the code is clean in one of two ways:
1) Portions were never under the GPL, and
2) Portions were written by the entity that sold them (was sold) to Google.
There is also likely a "de minimis" amount of code that is unclean, and is also not "functionally required", and thus coverable by copyright law. Being "de minimis" (i.e. minimal in quantity) it will probably be officially forgiven by the court system.
N.B.: This is suspcion, not knowledge. But Google has a lot of experience with GPL code, and usually plays it straight. Being under the GPL doesn't automatically mean it must be public. That's true only if the author insists AND it is publicly distributed.
P.S.: I suspect that much of this code is never distributed by Google, and the GPL is not the AGPL, so server side code doesn't need to be distributed, even if it is covered.
FWIW, a decade or so there was a story about UC med center sending it's records to a firm in Texas to by typed into the computer, which sub-contracted it to a firm in Florida, which outsourced it to a firm in India, which outsourced it to a firm in Pakistan. It only came to light because the Indian firm gypped the Pakistani firm and refused to pay them, so the Pakistani firm (actually, I believe it was a one-woman operation) refused to return the records, and sought to sell the information on-line. I didn't hear of anybody facing criminal charges, or even law suits. (I think the Florida firm had gone bankrupt, though it might have been the one in Texas.)
So the medical practitioner might not have sold the records, but it didn't make much difference. And HIPPA doesn't seem to keep any medical groups from using MSWind computers connected to the internet. So whether for-profit or non-profit, if you ship information out, it cannot be guaranteed secure. SOME activities may be legally prohibited, but they laws are only very laxly enforced, and many activities that expose the information aren't even forbidden.
That's what needs to happen to begin to restore justice. And that's what isn't going to happen.
If I understand the legal system correctly, if you communicate something to anyone who isn't in an attorney-client relationship with you, the authorities will claim that it is no longer private information, even if the other party is contractually obligated to not release it. And the authorities will usually be supported by the courts...or just not let the matter come to trial.
Do I believe that this is correct? No. Do I believe that this is what the laws meant at the time they were written? No. But I do believe this is how they are being enforced by those with power today.
How are you going to rertroactively kill them? Or are you claiming that because they would have rather have died prior to some experiences that they have had, that, having endured them, they now want to die anyway? But the enduring is a sunk cost, so if that's what you mean, your argument is fallacious.
Define your terms. Do it in such a way that an existence proof for a soul is possible. (Or, failing that, that it is possible to prove the absence of a soul, though that is distinctly inferior.)
14th problem in the same series: Justify refusing to kill something which has an immortal soul, while being willing to kill something which does not. (This one is a paraphrase from Voltaire.)
Well.... My first reaction was to say "Bingo!", but then I thought. Doesn't "sexting" imply that it was only text messages?
That's what they say. Why do you believe them? They are obviously a bunch of criminals attempting to cover their asses.
(N.B.: I'm not claiming it isn't true, I'm claiming that in context there is no reason to believe them. It sounds like the kind of lie they would invent to be a cover story, and no proof is offered. AND even if so it wouldn't justify their actions.)
You wear strange glasses. Most people I know criticize the president and the rest of the admininstration. They'v e even pretty much stopped saying "Well, they're well intentioned." And I'm talking about generally liberal people here. (Yes, I do know some who criticize the adminstration for not being conservative enough, for some definition or other of conservative, but I think of most of them as dingbats.)
Have they solve the problem of Hydrogen leaking rapidly through every thin membrane? Perhaps aluminized mylar would be impermeable? (That's a wild guess. I've done *NO* research. But it *would* be flashy.)
in this case I don't think there could be any claim made by the person distributing the GPL code.
to:
in this case I don't think there could be any claim made under trademark law by the person distributing the GPL code.
For that matter, copyright doesn't cover functionally required material. So copyright can't touch it...if you have a good lawyer. Patents, however, and trademarks, are totally different categories of law. Both are applicable, though in this case I don't think there could be any claim made by the person distributing the GPL code. But someone you've never heard of may hold a trademark that it could be ruled to be infringing. And there's NO reasonable protection from patents. Even a good lawyer, a clear case, and a fat wad of cash isn't a guarantee.
Well, much of the open source community got its start when ESR got upset that he couldn't make a proprietary printer driver do what he wanted it to. Perhaps you should look at your question again. You may still decide that it's reasonable that a corp should decide what capabilities the hardware it sold you should make available, but you also might change your mind.
That's not what Object programming considers an object. It would be more like:
"A struct and all the functions that use it as the first argument" depending on the language. Some languages would have it be a pointer to the above. One of the critical aspects of an object is that is has a local scope for each instance. In C this either means you are holding it on the stack, or you've done a malloc.
That said, you can definitely do object programming in C. Existence proof is offered by valac -C which takes Vala code and emits a C equivalent. (It uses the GObject protocol to do so.) Mind you, the code that it emits is nearly unreadable, but it *is* object programming in C.
It's definitely true that a lot of the problem can be explained by things being built in places that they shouldn't be. That's also clearly not the whole story.
Still, I don't know how I'd approportion the "blame". Sometimes you need both to happen before there's a disaster, sometimes one alone suffices. Sometimes even both together don't yield a disaster. Weather is chaotic. So is climate, though the scale is different. But even in chaos there are attractors. You don't often get snow in June (North of the Equator), unless you are on a really high mountain.
Anyone who tries to deny climate change, as in global warming (which doesn't meant warming in every locale), is either blindly prejudiced, lying, or just unwilling to look at the evidence.
True. Half the damages should be divided between the boards of directors and upper management.
In organizations where there is not a lot of publicity driven voting with funding from biased sources that should work fairly well, but that doesn't describe the US political system. Even so it should act to moderate the extremism. But note that that system is hardly describable as "plurality wins".
Even so, to me it looks as if the system that you have proposed will act so as to maintain and increase the concentration of wealth and power among those that already have it, and squeeze out those on the edges of power. This isn't something that I consider healthy in a society.
It's only a digital version you can receive if you can actually receive it.
To me it seems quite clear that WB acted in extremely bad faith with malice aforethought. It is not so clear that a good lawyer couldn't argue against an underfunded lawyer that they technically met their promise. But that doesn't mean that it's not quite resaonable to bad-mouth them, and let everyone else know how you feel about them.
FWIW, I have refused to purchase or support friends purchasing over paying to view movies, or other merchandise from any MPAA or RIAA member company for over a decade, so I am not an unbiased observer. My evaluation of their behavior may be subject to confirmation bias. But I feel this is their current implementation of "Never give a sucker an even break.".
There's nothing that they could do that would satisfy everyone, and so what. If the government were honorable, trustworthy, and could be depended to stay that way then they could adopt policies that would convince all reasonable people of their good intentions.
Since the initial conditions cannot be met, however, they probably can't convince anyone who doesn't blindly want to believe them. And rightly so.
No company in the US can be trusted to honor promises to keep your secret from the government. None. No matter what they say.
A reasonable question is "How many other countries are any better?", and I must admit that I don't know of any. But that doesn't mean that it is reasonable to trust a US corporation.
Why does it seem far fetched? I don't know that it's true, but I certainly don't find it unlikely. IBM was born out of the US Census (among other factors), and has always had strong ties to the federal government.
Sorry, but no. It's a system designs problem...except that those in power don't see it as a problem.
The basic problem is that the election process is plurality wins rather than majority wins. This ensures that the winner will be one of no more than two major parties when the system is in a stable or quasi-stable state. Third parties have essentially no chance. This is unlike a majority wins election where you have either multiple rounds of voting, or you condense the multiple rounds via some sort of ranking system. Condorcet is my favorite of these, but Instant Runoff Voting is nearly as good and is much easier to explain.
FWIW, it can be mathematically proven that there is no electoral system that will come to a fair decision in all cases (where fair means that most of the voters agree with the decision), but plurality wins is the worst of the five systems included in the study (which also included Condorcet and Instant Runoff).
Actually, I believe that a lottery would be far superior to the current system, if the pool of qualified candidates were large enough. A large part of the problem is that in major elections both of the plausible winners have incurred political debts to supporters that they are obligated to pay off. A lottery will usually select someone who has the popular opinion on most issues. And we've already had some real winners winning elections. (A late stage altzheimers patient was one of the most popular presidents, believe it if you can.)