Why should the rule be that the information you explicitly (or unknowingly) divulge through your web browser in the form of cookies, IP addresses, referers, information input into forms, and so on is NOT something you have essentially shared with that party as well as any 3rd-parties they wish to share it with?
So, if you write a check to me or pay me with a credit card, why should I not be able to hand your checking-account number or credit-card number and CVV2 code to any 3rd parties I wish to share it with? How about your address and phone number? As usual, common sense here says that giving information to one entity is not blanket permission for them to go spreading that information to others. If they want to do that, the general rule everywhere else is that they need to say who they're going to give it to and get permission first. Absent that permission, they do not have permission to give it out. Even those photos, people don't in fact have a right to sell them when my clothesline's in the back yard not readily visible from public property and you needed my permission to be somewhere you could take the photos in the first place. And if it's a photo of me, you don't even have a right to sell it if it was taken in a public place. You need permission (and a model release) from me first, and absent that permission you don't have it.
The rule on private property is that you do not have permission to use it unless and until the property owner says you do. If he doesn't say anything, you don't have permission.
The rule about inviting yourself into someone else's home is that you don't have the right to unless they say you can. If they don't say, you don't have permission.
Our world's full of things where a lack of explicit permission means you don't have permission. Now, as far as the site itself is concerned I don't object to them tracking what I do on that site. It's their site, I can't expect to access it without them knowing what I'm doing. But a third party, it's not their site. Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Hardly obscure. The only thing needed is to make it so the code used to build the firmware isn't the code you provided for everyone else to look at. I can think of a dozen ways to do that, starting with the obvious "patch file not in version control and not provided to anyone, applied manually between checkout and compile". If you're doing that, the back-doors don't have to be obscure at all because they won't be present in anything anyone can see.
The only way to truly tell is to build your own binaries from the supplied code and then diff the vendor-supplied firmware against your build. That of course suffers from problems with a large number of benign differences due to embedded source-code paths, timestamps due to the build being done at a different time, slight variations in the exact version of third-party libraries and so on.
I can learn to use Win8 just fine. It's not about ease-of-use, or how easy it is for a 3-year-old.
I don't want Win8 because it doesn't have the UI I need, plain and simple. I'm not playing the simple games a 3-year-old plays. I'm not just browsing the Web. I'm a professional software developer who needs a fairly large number of applications open at the same time, spread across 2 monitors. I'm doing coding, technical writing, spreadsheets, diagrams, running visual diff/merge tools, editing XML and HTML and Javascript and CSS, mucking about with databases. I'm running multiple SSH sessions to multiple machines to troubleshoot production issues. At home I'm playing an MMO, running a log parser, running the voice-chat client, running the browser to look up encounter strategies, all at once. And all of this? The one thing Win8 adds, the Metro UI, isn't just not designed to do this, it's designed to not do this. It's designed to have a single application visible at a time, the way a smartphone or tablet works.
Yes, I know, I can kick it back into traditional desktop mode. But that means extra steps every single time I use it, or using a third-party program to hack it into doing what I want. Win7, by contrast, doesn't need hacking or extra work. I see no reason to add extra work and non-vendor-supported hackery to get back to where I am now. Plus there's the question of software support: how many of the programs I must use every day will officially support Win8? Right now none. Not even the ones from Microsoft. I'd have to upgrade all my software to get versions with official support. And for work I can't upgrade, I have to remain on the versions that the company mandates internally. They won't be upgrading any time soon either, they have to first certify every single application as working on Win8 and then they have to get money budgeted to upgrade. In some cases software will have to be repurchased, and there's manpower and other costs associated with upgrading all those computers to a new OS and migrating all the existing data. Our hardware vendor will have to support Win8 on the hardware too or we'll have to purchase all new hardware. So overall the company isn't even going to think about Win8 until the next hardware refresh cycle comes along, and that isn't going to start for another 3 years or so. We just finished a hardware refresh at the end of last year, after all.
So in summary, it doesn't really matter how easily a 3-year-old with no exposure and no existing infrastructure requirements can use Win8. It matters how well Win8 suits the tasks I actually perform and the requirements I have for what my system needs to run. A 3-year-old can easily ride a Big Wheel, but that doesn't make a Big Wheel suitable as a vehicle for me to commute to work in.
Well, if I don't know that they carry the story, how exactly do they expect me to know I should go looking at their outlet for it? If I don't know a store carries an item, the question of my paying them for that item won't even come up because I won't be in that store looking for it. I'll be over in some other store that I know has what I'm looking for.
The newspapers believe that they have a right to force me to pay for telling someone else that their paper carries a story and what page it's on? I... can't think of a single bit of law supporting that position, anywhere. They certainly have the right to keep me from photocopying their story and handing it out to people, but "the right to be the only entity who can tell others the work exists" isn't something I find anywhere in copyright law.
Yes, but if this particular feature were left out, people would still buy it. The Appeals Court noted this clearly in their order:
The causal nexus requirement is not satisfied simply because removing an allegedly infringing component would leave a particular feature, application, or device less valued or inoperable. A laptop computer, for example, will not work (or work long enough) without a battery, cooling fan, or even the screws that may hold its frame together, and its value would be accordingly depreciated should those components be removed. That does not mean, however, that every such component is "core" to the operation of the machine, let alone that each component is the driver of consumer demand.
Apple's patented feature certainly adds value, but it's lack isn't a deal-breaker for most consumers.
It boils down to one question: Can I legally delegate reading and sorting my e-mail to my secretary/receptionist/administrative-assistant/etc.? That involves exactly the same situation, a third party reading the e-mail with the consent of the recipient. If it's legal, then Plimmer has no basis for his suit. There's a lot of basis for saying the networks and servers carrying the e-mail between the sender and the recipient can't go reading it, but there's not a lot of law restricting what the recipient can do or have done to/with mail and e-mail once they've received it. If you don't want the recipient letting others see the mail, you're going to have to have an agreement in place with them beforehand about that and your only recourse if they spread the mail around anyway will be against them for breach of that agreement. You won't have any recourse against any of the people they gave the mail to, because those people have no duty to you to not look at the recipient's mail (note: the recipient's mail, not yours, it ceased to be yours when you handed it over to the recipient).
1. There's at least half-a-dozen theories about that, none of which involve some invisible man in the sky. They're still working out which ones hold up and which ones don't. We don't have much good observational data that far back, although the latest round of space-based telescopes are helping fill that in.
2. No, it's not circular. Earth is fine-tuned for life simply because we could only exist if it were, if it weren't we wouldn't be here to talk about it. I'll pull back the poker analogy: you may look at the long odds of being dealt a royal flush and think it's highly unlikely it could happen so the royal flush you're staring in the face must'be been arranged somehow, but that argument falls apart when you remember that there were several million hands dealt and any that weren't royal flushes weren't given to you. We exist on a planet fine-tuned for life not because something fine-tuned it, but because the condition dice were rolled trillions of times, coming up with different conditions each time, and we'd only evolve on the handful that matched Earth's conditions. Had the conditions been different but still feasible for life to exist, we'd've evolved differently and would live in an environment similarly fine-tuned for the way we turned out. Earth isn't fine-tuned for life, the conditions that exist on Earth fine-tuned life to fit them.
3. Yes, indeed they were. And yet when those conditions are replicated, life does in fact evolve. And no, they didn't start with the end result. They started with a chemical brew matching what's known to have existed on early Earth and went from there. And no, as I said the earliest forms of life weren't cellular. Cells are actually a fair ways up the evolutionary ladder. As I said, scientists had already filled in the path from bare packets of DNA on up to full cellular organisms, and encountered a lot of weirdness along the way. The last bit to be filled in was that first step, from a brew of methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen to small packets of DNA. The evolution of prokaryotes from that is interesting, but wasn't nearly as much of a challenge as making the jump from a chemical soup to complex organic molecules.
I think your basic problem is that you're starting with a false premise: that natural selection can't create anything new. The problem is that that assumption's been shown to be false time and time again. We already know about mutation and how DNA can be changed, and how those changes result in new genetic traits that didn't exist before. You're stating something must be false that's been observed to be true many many times. Which is why I dismiss most Creationists: it simply isn't possible to discuss the matter with someone who rejects observed reality. Things don't cease to be true just because you find them inconvenient or uncomfortable.
For me, computer classes in high school started out with the history of computing, starting back in the 19th century with the use of punched cards to control looms and working forward through the era of IBM mainframes and into the first PCs. Then introductory programming in BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN, and classes that concentrated more on the theory of data structures and algorithms using Pascal (which was much more suited to the job than the other 3 major languages). Included were side-trips into the principles underlying the hardware and the differences between different CPUs. Half our work was done on early PCs, half on terminals attached via network to the district's central computers.
Things like word processors and spreadsheets were not covered in the computer classes. Those were over in the business curriculum, covered in classes on using and operating standard business machines. A lot of students would take those classes without ever taking a computer class.
1. And yet we can observe the remnants of just such an explosion. Creationism says that explosion didn't happen, so it predicts we won't see it's remnants. Creationism's prediction conflicts with observed evidence.
2. You forget one thing: if Earth weren't fine-tuned for life, we wouldn't be here to discuss it. And no matter the odds, given the likely number of planets in the universe it's a virtual certainty that any given set of conditions will occur at least once purely by chance. As Scarne puts it: "The odds don't tell you that you'll never be dealt a royal flush. They tell you how often you will be dealt one.".
3. And yet scientists have taken non-living material and in the lab subjected it to the conditions found on early Earth, and observed the formation of DNA and the other building blocks that, once present, almost inevitably combine to produce the simplest forms of organic life (which are in fact not single-celled organisms, they aren't even proper cells, but we know how cells evolve from them). If your theory predicts this won't happen, your theory conflicts with the observed evidence.
So, 3 swings, 3 strikes. Not an extremely good batting average there.
I've always though the opposite: it'd be nice if the default were individual offices where people could concentrate on the work at hand without disruption, with open shared workspaces available when needed. Especially with things like webcams for occasions when you need face-to-face with someone and don't need to leave the office.
Thought here: if you have that much of a problem with an open-plan office, do you really think your employees are any more satisfied with it than you are? I'm fairly sure they're having the same problem you have, with the same consequences for their work.
The problem is that Creationism is a discredited theory: it fails to match so much observed evidence, and fails to predict so many things we've found, that there's no longer any serious possibility that it might be correct. As a scientific theory, it should be chucked out into the dumpster to join Ptolomey's theory of celestial mechanics, phlogiston and a host of other discredited theories. It doesn't even have saving grace of eg. Newtonian mechanics: known to be incorrect, but a sufficiently close approximation for everyday use and much simpler to deal with than the more accurate theories.
The question "Am I too old to retrain/learn new things?" can be answered with another question: "Are you dead yet?". The answer to that second question is the answer to the first.
Whether you want to learn new things is another question, and equally valid. Myself, I'll keep rolling my eyes at the new kids who didn't bother to learn history and so keep repeating mistakes that were thoroughly hashed out decades ago, but I'll keep learning the new stuff until they push me over into the coffin. Or more likely, given my usual to-do list, I'll tell the morgue attendants to take a number and get in line, I should have time for them in about 3 weeks.
The difference is that the copy in your DVD player's memory isn't freely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
The copy of the book isn't either. If what's presented is copyright infringement, then every single library card catalog, every single snippet in a review, every single cover image would be copyright infringement. And canonically they're not.
And no, rights don't typically revert to the author just because the book's out-of-print. I've seen several authors having major fights with their publishers because the books are out-of-print with that publisher, the publisher has no intention of reprinting them, and the publisher won't give the rights back to the author so they can have the book reprinted elsewhere or distribute it themselves. The rights don't revert back until the contract ends or conditions in the contract allowing for reversion are met. This is actually a big problem for authors, a lot of their books sell well enough to be profitable but not well enough to make it worthwhile for the publisher to spend printing capacity on them instead of the latest new title and so the author ends up being completely unable to profit from their own work without a protracted legal fight.
Well, for one thing Google isn't putting the works up on their website. They're making a copy of the work to store in their database to be searched, but what appears on the search results page is an excerpt from the book (the same sort you see in Google's search results for web pages) and a link to where the book's available (eg. Amazon). So my question is, why should Google need permission from the copyright holder to index things for search? I classify the objections here the same way I classify objections to freely watching DVDs I've purchased copies of because technically watching it involves making an additional copy into the player's memory.
And as far as I can tell, in the cases where Google's making the work itself available it's in cases where the work isn't in print (ie. you can't buy it anywhere else) and the copyright holder can't be contacted or isn't known (ie. you can't contact them to get permission). In those cases I can't find anything wrong with Google's actions, the publisher obviously doesn't care about profiting from the work or it wouldn't be out of print and the copyright holder isn't profiting because the work isn't being sold and nobody has any way of getting the money to them if it were.
My thought: a browser is for viewing content, not performing raw operations. You probably don't want people to be able to delete content nodes on your server just by issuing a DELETE request, you'd want to POST a request to server-side code to perform the operation on the user's behalf so it can do proper filtering (eg. not permitting deletion of "/"). A browser isn't the only client around, and some things are just not things you really want to be doing in a browser. There's too little validation of what's going on, and letting ordinary users juggle running chainsaws rarely ends well.
I always respond to that this way: "But causation does imply correlation. Since we can't directly see causes (if we could, we wouldn't be investigating looking for them) and we need something that we can see to tell us where to start looking, correlation is as good a starting point as we're going to get.".
I think the best approach is to simply enforce the burden of proof: the plaintiff in these cases should have to lay out evidence to support their claims, and only if their claims and their evidence survive examination and in fact show some basis for believing something actionable has happened should the plaintiffs be allowed to proceed with discovery. A mere "I believe" should not be sufficient to get discovery. It is not being unfair to the plaintiff to require them to have some evidence to support their claim before they can proceed with a suit. That's supposed to be the minimum they already have before they can file suit, after all.
One thing I notice is that the index rating weights in favor of download speed more than upload. That's IMO misleading. It's OK in a world where people only consume content, but in an environment that includes Skype or Google Voice for telephone and video calls, Google Hangouts, cloud-based storage like Dropbox or Google Drive, workers remoting in to the office using VPNs and remote-desktop software, and mobile devices using WiFi and an Internet connection as an alternative to the regular cellular network, upload bandwidth is becoming as important as download bandwidth. Rating ISP A significantly higher than B when A's upload speed is half of B's and A's downloads are only 20% faster seems to me to be misleading.
Actually the FCC told them they can use their own spectrum, if they comply with the conditions they agreed to when they bought it. LS's problem is that they don't want to comply with those conditions. It looks to me like they knew they couldn't make their network fly with the original conditions in place, but they went ahead and bought the spectrum anyway betting that once they had it they could weasel out of complying with the conditions by boo-hooing about consumers. The FCC didn't buy it. I've little sympathy for LS, they should've just said up front "We can't make this work under those restrictions." and not bought the spectrum. Then they wouldn't have this problem.
It sounds like it's a management/supervisory issue here. Start by looking at the workload and results of the "slackers". Are they being given as much work as everybody else, and managing to get it done and still have time to "slack off"? If so, let them. The reward for getting your work done well and quickly's that you get free time. If they're not being given as much work as others, take a look at the workloads with an eye towards shifting things around. And if they're being given work and not getting it done, well, that's nothing special and your managers should already know how to talk to the employees about that problem.
Sometimes you won't be able to even out the workloads. Different people have different specialties, and sometimes the current workload just puts more work in some areas than others. That's only a problem if it's a persistent thing, with some people overloaded all the time and others with not enough to do. In that case, you need to shift people around to learn different parts of the system so they can help where it's needed. That'll take time, just acknowledge that they're learning a new area and won't be nearly as productive right off the bat as they would be if they already knew it inside-out.
And finally, acknowledge that slack time isn't a bad thing. Emergencies happen, problems crop up unexpectedly, and it's not a bad thing to have people free who can jump in and take up a problem without diverting time from scheduled work. It only becomes a problem if it's unbalanced and it's always the same people with free time. Again, that's a standard management issue of making sure the workload isn't uneven.
As for motivation, two things. First, pay. The single best way to motivate professional employees is to pay them for their work. Make sure your pay rates are good for your area and the job. And take a look at your annual raise policies. Inflation runs around 2-3%. If your company's routinely handing out raises less than that, your employees are going to be unhappy because their standard of living's slowly eroding. Words and such are nice, but at the end of the day the bills have to be paid and pats on the back and free cake at work don't pay the electric bill or the rent. Second, respect. Upper management expects employees to respect them even if those employees don't understand what management's doing. So show the same respect in return. If you as a manager don't understand the tech, don't sit there and contradict your IT and software-development people when they tell you what they think the best way to approach something is. Even if you've heard something from some consultant, remember that your IT people know your business and your systems better than that consultant (and the consultant isn't going to be on the hook if things go badly, he's already got his money). If what they're saying isn't what you want to hear, give them the simple respect of assuming they aren't just being jerks, they have good reasons for saying what they're saying and they know what they're doing in their field. If you don't think they are, then start tracking it. When things come up, note down who had what opinions. Then, after everything's done and you can look back on the actual results, note who was right and who was wrong and how badly. And if your IT department has a track record of being right more often than anyone else and someone comes in and says "The IT department just don't understand the business needs.", ask yourself what your IT people are going to think if you agree.
What's funny is that DNT doesn't say "Don't send me advertisements.". They're just throwing a tantrum, threatening to take all their toys and go home if they can't do absolutely anything they want any time they want. I say treat 'em like you'd treat the other 2-year-old on the playground who does that: shrug and go play with everybody else and their toys. Ain't worth puttin' up with the brat's drama.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if you write a check to me or pay me with a credit card, why should I not be able to hand your checking-account number or credit-card number and CVV2 code to any 3rd parties I wish to share it with? How about your address and phone number? As usual, common sense here says that giving information to one entity is not blanket permission for them to go spreading that information to others. If they want to do that, the general rule everywhere else is that they need to say who they're going to give it to and get permission first. Absent that permission, they do not have permission to give it out. Even those photos, people don't in fact have a right to sell them when my clothesline's in the back yard not readily visible from public property and you needed my permission to be somewhere you could take the photos in the first place. And if it's a photo of me, you don't even have a right to sell it if it was taken in a public place. You need permission (and a model release) from me first, and absent that permission you don't have it.
The rule on private property is that you do not have permission to use it unless and until the property owner says you do. If he doesn't say anything, you don't have permission.
The rule about inviting yourself into someone else's home is that you don't have the right to unless they say you can. If they don't say, you don't have permission.
Our world's full of things where a lack of explicit permission means you don't have permission. Now, as far as the site itself is concerned I don't object to them tracking what I do on that site. It's their site, I can't expect to access it without them knowing what I'm doing. But a third party, it's not their site. Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Hardly obscure. The only thing needed is to make it so the code used to build the firmware isn't the code you provided for everyone else to look at. I can think of a dozen ways to do that, starting with the obvious "patch file not in version control and not provided to anyone, applied manually between checkout and compile". If you're doing that, the back-doors don't have to be obscure at all because they won't be present in anything anyone can see.
The only way to truly tell is to build your own binaries from the supplied code and then diff the vendor-supplied firmware against your build. That of course suffers from problems with a large number of benign differences due to embedded source-code paths, timestamps due to the build being done at a different time, slight variations in the exact version of third-party libraries and so on.
I can learn to use Win8 just fine. It's not about ease-of-use, or how easy it is for a 3-year-old.
I don't want Win8 because it doesn't have the UI I need, plain and simple. I'm not playing the simple games a 3-year-old plays. I'm not just browsing the Web. I'm a professional software developer who needs a fairly large number of applications open at the same time, spread across 2 monitors. I'm doing coding, technical writing, spreadsheets, diagrams, running visual diff/merge tools, editing XML and HTML and Javascript and CSS, mucking about with databases. I'm running multiple SSH sessions to multiple machines to troubleshoot production issues. At home I'm playing an MMO, running a log parser, running the voice-chat client, running the browser to look up encounter strategies, all at once. And all of this? The one thing Win8 adds, the Metro UI, isn't just not designed to do this, it's designed to not do this. It's designed to have a single application visible at a time, the way a smartphone or tablet works.
Yes, I know, I can kick it back into traditional desktop mode. But that means extra steps every single time I use it, or using a third-party program to hack it into doing what I want. Win7, by contrast, doesn't need hacking or extra work. I see no reason to add extra work and non-vendor-supported hackery to get back to where I am now. Plus there's the question of software support: how many of the programs I must use every day will officially support Win8? Right now none. Not even the ones from Microsoft. I'd have to upgrade all my software to get versions with official support. And for work I can't upgrade, I have to remain on the versions that the company mandates internally. They won't be upgrading any time soon either, they have to first certify every single application as working on Win8 and then they have to get money budgeted to upgrade. In some cases software will have to be repurchased, and there's manpower and other costs associated with upgrading all those computers to a new OS and migrating all the existing data. Our hardware vendor will have to support Win8 on the hardware too or we'll have to purchase all new hardware. So overall the company isn't even going to think about Win8 until the next hardware refresh cycle comes along, and that isn't going to start for another 3 years or so. We just finished a hardware refresh at the end of last year, after all.
So in summary, it doesn't really matter how easily a 3-year-old with no exposure and no existing infrastructure requirements can use Win8. It matters how well Win8 suits the tasks I actually perform and the requirements I have for what my system needs to run. A 3-year-old can easily ride a Big Wheel, but that doesn't make a Big Wheel suitable as a vehicle for me to commute to work in.
Well, if I don't know that they carry the story, how exactly do they expect me to know I should go looking at their outlet for it? If I don't know a store carries an item, the question of my paying them for that item won't even come up because I won't be in that store looking for it. I'll be over in some other store that I know has what I'm looking for.
The newspapers believe that they have a right to force me to pay for telling someone else that their paper carries a story and what page it's on? I... can't think of a single bit of law supporting that position, anywhere. They certainly have the right to keep me from photocopying their story and handing it out to people, but "the right to be the only entity who can tell others the work exists" isn't something I find anywhere in copyright law.
Yes, but if this particular feature were left out, people would still buy it. The Appeals Court noted this clearly in their order:
Apple's patented feature certainly adds value, but it's lack isn't a deal-breaker for most consumers.
What precisely is different about my authorizing a third party to read all my mail, vs. my authorizing a third party to read all my mail?
It boils down to one question: Can I legally delegate reading and sorting my e-mail to my secretary/receptionist/administrative-assistant/etc.? That involves exactly the same situation, a third party reading the e-mail with the consent of the recipient. If it's legal, then Plimmer has no basis for his suit. There's a lot of basis for saying the networks and servers carrying the e-mail between the sender and the recipient can't go reading it, but there's not a lot of law restricting what the recipient can do or have done to/with mail and e-mail once they've received it. If you don't want the recipient letting others see the mail, you're going to have to have an agreement in place with them beforehand about that and your only recourse if they spread the mail around anyway will be against them for breach of that agreement. You won't have any recourse against any of the people they gave the mail to, because those people have no duty to you to not look at the recipient's mail (note: the recipient's mail, not yours, it ceased to be yours when you handed it over to the recipient).
1. There's at least half-a-dozen theories about that, none of which involve some invisible man in the sky. They're still working out which ones hold up and which ones don't. We don't have much good observational data that far back, although the latest round of space-based telescopes are helping fill that in.
2. No, it's not circular. Earth is fine-tuned for life simply because we could only exist if it were, if it weren't we wouldn't be here to talk about it. I'll pull back the poker analogy: you may look at the long odds of being dealt a royal flush and think it's highly unlikely it could happen so the royal flush you're staring in the face must'be been arranged somehow, but that argument falls apart when you remember that there were several million hands dealt and any that weren't royal flushes weren't given to you. We exist on a planet fine-tuned for life not because something fine-tuned it, but because the condition dice were rolled trillions of times, coming up with different conditions each time, and we'd only evolve on the handful that matched Earth's conditions. Had the conditions been different but still feasible for life to exist, we'd've evolved differently and would live in an environment similarly fine-tuned for the way we turned out. Earth isn't fine-tuned for life, the conditions that exist on Earth fine-tuned life to fit them.
3. Yes, indeed they were. And yet when those conditions are replicated, life does in fact evolve. And no, they didn't start with the end result. They started with a chemical brew matching what's known to have existed on early Earth and went from there. And no, as I said the earliest forms of life weren't cellular. Cells are actually a fair ways up the evolutionary ladder. As I said, scientists had already filled in the path from bare packets of DNA on up to full cellular organisms, and encountered a lot of weirdness along the way. The last bit to be filled in was that first step, from a brew of methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen to small packets of DNA. The evolution of prokaryotes from that is interesting, but wasn't nearly as much of a challenge as making the jump from a chemical soup to complex organic molecules.
I think your basic problem is that you're starting with a false premise: that natural selection can't create anything new. The problem is that that assumption's been shown to be false time and time again. We already know about mutation and how DNA can be changed, and how those changes result in new genetic traits that didn't exist before. You're stating something must be false that's been observed to be true many many times. Which is why I dismiss most Creationists: it simply isn't possible to discuss the matter with someone who rejects observed reality. Things don't cease to be true just because you find them inconvenient or uncomfortable.
For me, computer classes in high school started out with the history of computing, starting back in the 19th century with the use of punched cards to control looms and working forward through the era of IBM mainframes and into the first PCs. Then introductory programming in BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN, and classes that concentrated more on the theory of data structures and algorithms using Pascal (which was much more suited to the job than the other 3 major languages). Included were side-trips into the principles underlying the hardware and the differences between different CPUs. Half our work was done on early PCs, half on terminals attached via network to the district's central computers.
Things like word processors and spreadsheets were not covered in the computer classes. Those were over in the business curriculum, covered in classes on using and operating standard business machines. A lot of students would take those classes without ever taking a computer class.
1. And yet we can observe the remnants of just such an explosion. Creationism says that explosion didn't happen, so it predicts we won't see it's remnants. Creationism's prediction conflicts with observed evidence.
2. You forget one thing: if Earth weren't fine-tuned for life, we wouldn't be here to discuss it. And no matter the odds, given the likely number of planets in the universe it's a virtual certainty that any given set of conditions will occur at least once purely by chance. As Scarne puts it: "The odds don't tell you that you'll never be dealt a royal flush. They tell you how often you will be dealt one.".
3. And yet scientists have taken non-living material and in the lab subjected it to the conditions found on early Earth, and observed the formation of DNA and the other building blocks that, once present, almost inevitably combine to produce the simplest forms of organic life (which are in fact not single-celled organisms, they aren't even proper cells, but we know how cells evolve from them). If your theory predicts this won't happen, your theory conflicts with the observed evidence.
So, 3 swings, 3 strikes. Not an extremely good batting average there.
I've always though the opposite: it'd be nice if the default were individual offices where people could concentrate on the work at hand without disruption, with open shared workspaces available when needed. Especially with things like webcams for occasions when you need face-to-face with someone and don't need to leave the office.
Thought here: if you have that much of a problem with an open-plan office, do you really think your employees are any more satisfied with it than you are? I'm fairly sure they're having the same problem you have, with the same consequences for their work.
The problem is that Creationism is a discredited theory: it fails to match so much observed evidence, and fails to predict so many things we've found, that there's no longer any serious possibility that it might be correct. As a scientific theory, it should be chucked out into the dumpster to join Ptolomey's theory of celestial mechanics, phlogiston and a host of other discredited theories. It doesn't even have saving grace of eg. Newtonian mechanics: known to be incorrect, but a sufficiently close approximation for everyday use and much simpler to deal with than the more accurate theories.
The question "Am I too old to retrain/learn new things?" can be answered with another question: "Are you dead yet?". The answer to that second question is the answer to the first.
Whether you want to learn new things is another question, and equally valid. Myself, I'll keep rolling my eyes at the new kids who didn't bother to learn history and so keep repeating mistakes that were thoroughly hashed out decades ago, but I'll keep learning the new stuff until they push me over into the coffin. Or more likely, given my usual to-do list, I'll tell the morgue attendants to take a number and get in line, I should have time for them in about 3 weeks.
The copy of the book isn't either. If what's presented is copyright infringement, then every single library card catalog, every single snippet in a review, every single cover image would be copyright infringement. And canonically they're not.
And no, rights don't typically revert to the author just because the book's out-of-print. I've seen several authors having major fights with their publishers because the books are out-of-print with that publisher, the publisher has no intention of reprinting them, and the publisher won't give the rights back to the author so they can have the book reprinted elsewhere or distribute it themselves. The rights don't revert back until the contract ends or conditions in the contract allowing for reversion are met. This is actually a big problem for authors, a lot of their books sell well enough to be profitable but not well enough to make it worthwhile for the publisher to spend printing capacity on them instead of the latest new title and so the author ends up being completely unable to profit from their own work without a protracted legal fight.
Well, for one thing Google isn't putting the works up on their website. They're making a copy of the work to store in their database to be searched, but what appears on the search results page is an excerpt from the book (the same sort you see in Google's search results for web pages) and a link to where the book's available (eg. Amazon). So my question is, why should Google need permission from the copyright holder to index things for search? I classify the objections here the same way I classify objections to freely watching DVDs I've purchased copies of because technically watching it involves making an additional copy into the player's memory.
And as far as I can tell, in the cases where Google's making the work itself available it's in cases where the work isn't in print (ie. you can't buy it anywhere else) and the copyright holder can't be contacted or isn't known (ie. you can't contact them to get permission). In those cases I can't find anything wrong with Google's actions, the publisher obviously doesn't care about profiting from the work or it wouldn't be out of print and the copyright holder isn't profiting because the work isn't being sold and nobody has any way of getting the money to them if it were.
My thought: a browser is for viewing content, not performing raw operations. You probably don't want people to be able to delete content nodes on your server just by issuing a DELETE request, you'd want to POST a request to server-side code to perform the operation on the user's behalf so it can do proper filtering (eg. not permitting deletion of "/"). A browser isn't the only client around, and some things are just not things you really want to be doing in a browser. There's too little validation of what's going on, and letting ordinary users juggle running chainsaws rarely ends well.
I always respond to that this way: "But causation does imply correlation. Since we can't directly see causes (if we could, we wouldn't be investigating looking for them) and we need something that we can see to tell us where to start looking, correlation is as good a starting point as we're going to get.".
I think the best approach is to simply enforce the burden of proof: the plaintiff in these cases should have to lay out evidence to support their claims, and only if their claims and their evidence survive examination and in fact show some basis for believing something actionable has happened should the plaintiffs be allowed to proceed with discovery. A mere "I believe" should not be sufficient to get discovery. It is not being unfair to the plaintiff to require them to have some evidence to support their claim before they can proceed with a suit. That's supposed to be the minimum they already have before they can file suit, after all.
One thing I notice is that the index rating weights in favor of download speed more than upload. That's IMO misleading. It's OK in a world where people only consume content, but in an environment that includes Skype or Google Voice for telephone and video calls, Google Hangouts, cloud-based storage like Dropbox or Google Drive, workers remoting in to the office using VPNs and remote-desktop software, and mobile devices using WiFi and an Internet connection as an alternative to the regular cellular network, upload bandwidth is becoming as important as download bandwidth. Rating ISP A significantly higher than B when A's upload speed is half of B's and A's downloads are only 20% faster seems to me to be misleading.
Actually the FCC told them they can use their own spectrum, if they comply with the conditions they agreed to when they bought it. LS's problem is that they don't want to comply with those conditions. It looks to me like they knew they couldn't make their network fly with the original conditions in place, but they went ahead and bought the spectrum anyway betting that once they had it they could weasel out of complying with the conditions by boo-hooing about consumers. The FCC didn't buy it. I've little sympathy for LS, they should've just said up front "We can't make this work under those restrictions." and not bought the spectrum. Then they wouldn't have this problem.
It sounds like it's a management/supervisory issue here. Start by looking at the workload and results of the "slackers". Are they being given as much work as everybody else, and managing to get it done and still have time to "slack off"? If so, let them. The reward for getting your work done well and quickly's that you get free time. If they're not being given as much work as others, take a look at the workloads with an eye towards shifting things around. And if they're being given work and not getting it done, well, that's nothing special and your managers should already know how to talk to the employees about that problem.
Sometimes you won't be able to even out the workloads. Different people have different specialties, and sometimes the current workload just puts more work in some areas than others. That's only a problem if it's a persistent thing, with some people overloaded all the time and others with not enough to do. In that case, you need to shift people around to learn different parts of the system so they can help where it's needed. That'll take time, just acknowledge that they're learning a new area and won't be nearly as productive right off the bat as they would be if they already knew it inside-out.
And finally, acknowledge that slack time isn't a bad thing. Emergencies happen, problems crop up unexpectedly, and it's not a bad thing to have people free who can jump in and take up a problem without diverting time from scheduled work. It only becomes a problem if it's unbalanced and it's always the same people with free time. Again, that's a standard management issue of making sure the workload isn't uneven.
As for motivation, two things. First, pay. The single best way to motivate professional employees is to pay them for their work. Make sure your pay rates are good for your area and the job. And take a look at your annual raise policies. Inflation runs around 2-3%. If your company's routinely handing out raises less than that, your employees are going to be unhappy because their standard of living's slowly eroding. Words and such are nice, but at the end of the day the bills have to be paid and pats on the back and free cake at work don't pay the electric bill or the rent. Second, respect. Upper management expects employees to respect them even if those employees don't understand what management's doing. So show the same respect in return. If you as a manager don't understand the tech, don't sit there and contradict your IT and software-development people when they tell you what they think the best way to approach something is. Even if you've heard something from some consultant, remember that your IT people know your business and your systems better than that consultant (and the consultant isn't going to be on the hook if things go badly, he's already got his money). If what they're saying isn't what you want to hear, give them the simple respect of assuming they aren't just being jerks, they have good reasons for saying what they're saying and they know what they're doing in their field. If you don't think they are, then start tracking it. When things come up, note down who had what opinions. Then, after everything's done and you can look back on the actual results, note who was right and who was wrong and how badly. And if your IT department has a track record of being right more often than anyone else and someone comes in and says "The IT department just don't understand the business needs.", ask yourself what your IT people are going to think if you agree.
What's funny is that DNT doesn't say "Don't send me advertisements.". They're just throwing a tantrum, threatening to take all their toys and go home if they can't do absolutely anything they want any time they want. I say treat 'em like you'd treat the other 2-year-old on the playground who does that: shrug and go play with everybody else and their toys. Ain't worth puttin' up with the brat's drama.