You'll forgive me if I didn't write a tome on the subject:-) There's a trillion other dangers too, but somebody, at some point, when reading from the disk, has to do this, and it's probably C/C++.
There you go again, proving something wrong by pulling an example of a dumb thing you can do with a technology. Who the hell starts up 5000 threads on a routine basis? If that's happening, you're probably out of the tested and claimed domain of the program.
You seem to want programs to prevent you from using them wrongly. Can't happen. Mathematically provable for sufficiently precise definitions of "wrong". If you insist on living in that world, expect to pay the usual price for a disconnection from reality, whereas the rest of will continue to have tools that allow us to do dumb things like open 15000 GUI windows, but somehow, we manage to avoid it, without people like you holding our hands.
A lot of communication-based programming can involve taking a stream from some device, like a network, and simply saying casting that data into some struct, so C can access the chunks.
There are also some nice tricks you can sometimes play with integer-based data by casting them into integers, and doing something with them. "Going through channels" can take too much time, if you know what you're doing.
Almost everything comes down to a C or C++ base, which takes care of the dirty bits. Somebody needs to take care of the dirty bits.
That said, some people underestimate the value of staying in the channels. Whether or not the person you replied to is one of them is not something we could determine without knowing what kind of programs he writes.
You write a lot of good reasons to not use RPC calls like normal function calls.
How fortunate that I don't know anyone who does.
Just because there's a performance difference between RPC and LPC doesn't mean that we HAVE to have a different interface for the two. In fact, it's downright stupid to deny yourself the simplicity of function-like RPC calling when it's what the situation calls for.
If a program in question has other needs, then do something else.
You are making a mountain out of a molehill. Show me a program that has the problems you are so worried about. I don't see one. I see programmers using RPC and other methods correctly for the situation.
Netscape 4 doesn't qualify as a browser. Or if you insist that it does, it's a braindead browser.
I've jettisoned designing for Netscape 4. Considering that my pages work in every other goddamn browser ever created, I consider it an adequate tradeoff.
Flush N4 down the toilet. (And yes, I run a Pentium 133. I tend to just use lynx.)
Please do us all a favor and release your code now. I totally don't care what state it's in, what we need is the prior art so that nobody else can patent this stuff later and hit you with a suit when/if this takes off.
Just tarball it and post it somewhere with a good timestamp on it. Please! Release a good version later, or not at all, but the sooner prior art simply exists, the better!
The EuroLinux article links to a French version of the text; an English version can be obtained by changing the "f" to an "e" (or following my link).
Here's the part on Mathematics:
These are a particular example of the principle that purely abstract or intellectual methods are not patentable. For example, a shortcut method of division would not be patentable but a calculating machine constructed to operate accordingly may well be patentable. A mathematical method for designing electrical filters is not patentable; nevertheless filters designed according to this method would not be excluded from patentability by Art. 52(2) and (3).
First, note that the Patent office, evidently not being staffed by mathematicians, believe that they have not rendered mathematics patentable. Or, in other words, explanation-free protests based on the statement that they have will only confuse them, and cause them to distrust the protesters. After all, "These are a particular example of the principle that purely abstract or intellectual methods are not patentable."
I see three problems with this:
"Purely abstract or intellectual methods" often are algorithms. For example, we tend to express the mathematical concept of "graph reachability" as the algorithm that tells us whether a given node is reachable from another. It can be defined other ways (including second order existential logic), but we tend to think of it algoritmically first, moreso for complicated properties.
Therefore, despite protests from the Patent Office that mathematics are not patentable, damn near every discrete mathematics definition and algorithm is patentable, or close enough that a the prospect of fighting a patent would scare anybody.
"A mathematical method for designing electrical filters is not patentable; nevertheless filters designed according to this method would not be excluded from patentability by Art. 52(2) and (3)." Functions are only relevent in terms of the results. (Merely specifying a domain is rarely useful.) If one can create a mathematic concept, then proceed to creatively patent the (useful, for the Patent Office's amazingly low standard of "useful") results that can come from concept and associated functions, then the only useful part of the concept is effectively patented. Combine this with the next problem ->
An increasing amount of math is taking place on computers. For instance, the famouse and importent 4-Color problem was proven by a computer. This will only increase over time. Therefore, there may be no difference between the abstract math and the concrete implementation, which means there is no difference between patenting math and patenting an algorithm.
Remember that as you protest to the EU. They don't speak our language and, frankly, they don't know jack shit about math. And it shows. They honestly think that under these rules, math is still unpatentable.
(And frankly, I don't think we stand a chance in Hades of convincing them otherwise. The more ignorant you are, the more you think you know on a given topic, and I'd lay money these people honestly believe they know mathematics. Which means they will not listen to people like us.)
You don't give any details of the abuse, so it makes it hard to advise specifics.
However, I'm assuming you're running some sort of service that involves a server you can program. (If this is an EZBoard being abused, which you use but don't control, you're toast.) The key is to ban the behavior, not the user. Exactly how you do that depends on the exact situation.
If someone's posting too often, make people wait at least n seconds before posting again. If they abuse that, kick the time up. And if they're posting rapid-fire, keep kicking the time up. Look into "exponential decay", it's what you're looking for. Once they cross a threshold, you may choose to ban the IP for a week and delete whatever messages were posted automatically, thus undoing the abuse automatically, which is kinda the key to this whole idea.
Think outside the "IP ban" box. What you do for other services depends. Ban behavior, not people. It's a little harder at first, but much more reliable.
Granted, most films are not "high art" (or even close to it, usually) but is the easily found "lowest common denominator" fuel going to power the Pixar machine forever?
IMHO, this is not a valid complaint. If the "lowerst common denominator" fuel is so "easy" to find, then how come Monsters, Inc. is the first film in a long time to pull it off without me, a rather sensitive person, ever feeling insulted, cheated, or ripped off?
The movie deserves more credit then to be dismissed as "lowest common denominator". I mean, come on! "Scary Movie", now that's LCD. This ain't no "Scary Movie", it's a lot better.
Exactly what did you expect, in a movie meant to at least be accessible by children? Angst? Dark imagery? Excessive ambiguity you interpret at subtlety, and pat yourself on the back for finding? Validation/challenging of your world view?
I've seen a lot of LCD crap. Monsters, Inc. is not it.
(By far the worst statements of this kind I've seen come from this Salon review, where the reviewer spends two page bitching about the movie he would rather have made, and the changes he would have made, which would have utterly destroyed the movie (and left it something else entirely), rather then actually reviewing the movie.)
They would pretend that the DVD contains a "program" which plays the "movie data"
Errrr, no, they couldn't. Even a judge can see through that one. The program is quite clearly in the player.
'Not all movies are protected by the first amendment.'
The ones Warner Brothers make are!!!
'Not all movies ARE software, because not all movies are on DVD.'
The only thing we're talking about is movies on DVD. The existance of other things doesn't much matter. It's DVD's WB wants to claim are software.
BTW, the important thing about Warner w.r.t. the DeCSS case is that they are a member of the DVD CCA (the movie / CSS people), not the RIAA (the music people). They're all evil, so it's easy to get them mixed up...
Ahhhh, frick.;-)
And yes, 3 is weak. Like I said, the only thing we get here is an admission that *some* software is isomorphic to first-amendment protectable content. The point is that in the DeCSS case, the movie industry wants to argue that *no* software is first-amendment-protectable.
(From my weblog:) I would like to propose an interesting spin on this story: Should Warner Brothers win, then the following syllogism will hold:
All movies are expressions that in America would be protected under the First Amendment.
All movies are software (since all movies can be put on DVD).
There exists at least one movie.
Therefore, there exists software that in America would be protected under the First Amendment.
Once a single piece of software is over that line, it's going to be very, very hard to draw a line that includes movies (movies, of all things!), yet excludes other things.
This story hails from Australia, not the USA, but it would still probably have some interesting ramifications, even in Australia.
Note that in particular, DeCSS, a DVD decryption program, is trying to claim software-as-expression as a defense in the USA. Warner, a member of the RIAA, has gone on record now, at least in Australia, as claiming that DVD movies are an instance of a thing that is both software and an expression protectable under the First Amendment.
I keep track of the kind of thing Cryptome covers. It affects you, after a while.
Overall, are you optimistic or pessimistic that we will eventually (call it 5-20 years) have a society that you would find reasonably acceptable? Or do you think we're destined for one form or another of effective totalitarianism?
Let's just shortcut the whole debate, OK? In the final analysis, all things are taken on faith, because none of us can be sure that our senses are telling the truth. Period.
Once you accept the reality of the outside world, if indeed you do (and if you don't, you might as well 'stop reading' now, inasmuch as that has meaning), you can reason about it.
While we can never make statements with 100% confidence, I'm certainly vastly more confident about "A large mass, which can only be a planet (basically, the definition of a planet is "a large mass in orbit around a star" (though there's more of course), is causing the star to wobble", then whatever other explanation you can come up with.
"The star wobbles for no reason, in flat contradiction to every other observed behavior of physical objects"? Sorry, that doesn't rate highly with me.
You make the classic mistake... that because nothing is 100% certain, all things are 0% certain. The logic doesn't hold; there are middle grounds, certainties between 0% and 100%, and as soon as that is true, the "either-or" breaks down. And you are thrust, kicking and screaming, back into the world the rest of us inhabit, where you actually have to decide, and act upon, what you believe to be true.
Personally, I recommend continuing to act as if gravity and intertia are true. It gets messy when you try to deny those things. I'd link the rotton.com pictures but that's probably just mean... besides, I don't particularly like looking at them.
Compare apples to apples, please. An "X" for a CD-ROM drive is 150KB/s. I don't know what an "X" is for a DVD drive, but I'm pretty darned certain that it's more then that, because my old "2X" DVD drive could play DVD's... and I *know* DVDs need more then 300KB/s to play correctly.
Why not re-write your post, using KB/s instead of "X"?
In fact, increasing the density of a drive often increases the possible speed of the drive. Sometimes (sometimes!) the constaining factor on a drive is how fast the media can be spun. Modern CD drives are pretty much at this limit; you just can't spin CD's reliably at "100X", even if you had the theoretical ability to read the data that fast. (Yes, I know no CD player comes even close to that speed; that's my point.) But if you spin the DVD at the same max speed a CD drive can spin a CD, then the DVD drive will be able to transfer significantly more quickly.
Rather then a "tradeoff" between speed and capacity, you usually get the opposite: Both coming at once. Esp. in the mature version of a technology, which is where we are now with CD players and either are, or will be within months, for DVD players.
Of course, you can still do it, despite those limitations. You can take the satellite up, and start boosting at the right time and slingshotting it around until you have enough energy to get to Mars, virtually for free... except for time. This would take years.
Money, money, money. It's all about money. (Same reason you can't do what a sibling of this message proposes, which is assemble it in pieces. Of course there's no technical reason that's impossible, just monetary. We have other things to do with launches then to send up a shuttle multiple times for one Mars probe.)
Why should I take that quote at face value, as you do? It comes from a guy trying to get rid of the so-called "guru"! Sources don't come more suspicious then that! Meanwhile, the empirical evidence flatly contradicts the guru status. Knowlege ain't skills!
"Guru"? Nothing he did worked. How, exactly, did this person attain "guru" status? Sure, the guy trying to get rid of him claimed he had knowlege, but why assume he had skills? (Esp. for the people posting without reading the article.)
There's an amusing stereotype at work in the posts here... we are automatically granting "guru" status because he is quirky. Sorry, I still look for skillz, and all the evidence suggests that was lacking. (Uncommented assembly may indicate guru status, but only when it works... when it doesn't work, it indicates an overestimation of personal skill. Not much middle ground here.)
The fact is that there is every bit as much room for an exceptionally talented person to bend the rules as there ever has been. Our definition of exceptionally talented is rising, though. (Besides, eccentricity itself seems to be on the decline.)
I love it how whenever someone DARES suggest the USA isn't 100% perfect, he gets flamed to pieces for being ignorant, heartless, anti-american, etc. etc.
No, no, no! That is not it at all, and I'm sick of people seeing this as so black-and-white.
The US is not 100% perfect. I'll be the first to say it. How in the hell could the US be perfect? Throughout the majority of the century, the entire world (not just the US) has been flying by the seat of its pants. How is one supposed to predict the results of actions, when all history, the only way to truly understand such things, is more-or-less irrelevent? Even the US, which at least wants to be ethical, most of the time, hasn't been perfect; at least we tried, most of the time.
What is burning our bacon is those atrophied brains ("atrophied" from thinking the same thoughts, over and over again, for the last forty years, and subsuming everything into their matrix with a religious fervor) that are declaring that the US is 100% evil, a common but amazing narrow-minded and even dangerous view. Get real! Things aren't that black-and-white in either direction.
Yet all these people have been coming out in force, after having been briefly silenced by the tragedy of the WTC (which they couldn't admit to being glad occurred). I wish they'd open their minds. It's worth observing an awful lot of them are academics with no significant real-world experience to counter-balance their own over-fitting the world to their Ivory Tower philosophies. (Look up what statistical overfitting is if you don't know what it is... the concept matches religious subsumption of reality almost precisely.) I wish they'd open their minds and their eyes, and start seeing nuances.
I award this article the Worst Slashdot Lawyers Ever award. Not a single legally valid opinion is ranked above 3. Several utterly uninformed opinions are ranked at 4 or 5. Half the replies miss the point. Absolutely amazingly horrible. A record high noise/signal ratio. Wow.
Please for Gnu's sake don't whip off a letter to your Congresscritter based on this article; most posters have already looked stupid enough.
(Oh, in case you're wondering, the subject of this article is a funny-chortle, but no more. It has all the legal force of a Taliban edict in this country.)
Slashdot Mirror
You'll forgive me if I didn't write a tome on the subject :-) There's a trillion other dangers too, but somebody, at some point, when reading from the disk, has to do this, and it's probably C/C++.
There you go again, proving something wrong by pulling an example of a dumb thing you can do with a technology. Who the hell starts up 5000 threads on a routine basis? If that's happening, you're probably out of the tested and claimed domain of the program.
You seem to want programs to prevent you from using them wrongly. Can't happen. Mathematically provable for sufficiently precise definitions of "wrong". If you insist on living in that world, expect to pay the usual price for a disconnection from reality, whereas the rest of will continue to have tools that allow us to do dumb things like open 15000 GUI windows, but somehow, we manage to avoid it, without people like you holding our hands.
Except on porn sites & typo sites.
A lot of communication-based programming can involve taking a stream from some device, like a network, and simply saying casting that data into some struct, so C can access the chunks.
There are also some nice tricks you can sometimes play with integer-based data by casting them into integers, and doing something with them. "Going through channels" can take too much time, if you know what you're doing.
Almost everything comes down to a C or C++ base, which takes care of the dirty bits. Somebody needs to take care of the dirty bits.
That said, some people underestimate the value of staying in the channels. Whether or not the person you replied to is one of them is not something we could determine without knowing what kind of programs he writes.
You write a lot of good reasons to not use RPC calls like normal function calls.
How fortunate that I don't know anyone who does.
Just because there's a performance difference between RPC and LPC doesn't mean that we HAVE to have a different interface for the two. In fact, it's downright stupid to deny yourself the simplicity of function-like RPC calling when it's what the situation calls for.
If a program in question has other needs, then do something else.
You are making a mountain out of a molehill. Show me a program that has the problems you are so worried about. I don't see one. I see programmers using RPC and other methods correctly for the situation.
For a change.
Netscape 4 doesn't qualify as a browser. Or if you insist that it does, it's a braindead browser.
I've jettisoned designing for Netscape 4. Considering that my pages work in every other goddamn browser ever created, I consider it an adequate tradeoff.
Flush N4 down the toilet. (And yes, I run a Pentium 133. I tend to just use lynx.)
Please do us all a favor and release your code now. I totally don't care what state it's in, what we need is the prior art so that nobody else can patent this stuff later and hit you with a suit when/if this takes off.
Just tarball it and post it somewhere with a good timestamp on it. Please! Release a good version later, or not at all, but the sooner prior art simply exists, the better!
I think Honda is trying to sell joe-doe life to socially incapable rich geeks.
Or those of us too enlightened to demand our spouses do that.
Or perhaps more accurately in my case, those of us with spouses too enlightened to allow us to get away with demanding that.
Side note: Damn enlightenment.
If you think all demos are always accurate, you're in no position to making snide comments about other people's wisdom.
It always comes down to the same handful of logical fallacies.
"There exists some true theories that are hard to believe" -/-> "All theories that are hard to believe are true."
Here's the part on Mathematics:
First, note that the Patent office, evidently not being staffed by mathematicians, believe that they have not rendered mathematics patentable. Or, in other words, explanation-free protests based on the statement that they have will only confuse them, and cause them to distrust the protesters. After all, "These are a particular example of the principle that purely abstract or intellectual methods are not patentable."
I see three problems with this:
- "Purely abstract or intellectual methods" often are algorithms. For example, we tend to express the mathematical concept of "graph reachability" as the algorithm that tells us whether a given node is reachable from another. It can be defined other ways (including second order existential logic), but we tend to think of it algoritmically first, moreso for complicated properties.
- "A mathematical method for designing electrical filters is not patentable; nevertheless filters designed according to this method would not be excluded from patentability by Art. 52(2) and (3)." Functions are only relevent in terms of the results. (Merely specifying a domain is rarely useful.) If one can create a mathematic concept, then proceed to creatively patent the (useful, for the Patent Office's amazingly low standard of "useful") results that can come from concept and associated functions, then the only useful part of the concept is effectively patented. Combine this with the next problem ->
- An increasing amount of math is taking place on computers. For instance, the famouse and importent 4-Color problem was proven by a computer. This will only increase over time. Therefore, there may be no difference between the abstract math and the concrete implementation, which means there is no difference between patenting math and patenting an algorithm.
Remember that as you protest to the EU. They don't speak our language and, frankly, they don't know jack shit about math. And it shows. They honestly think that under these rules, math is still unpatentable.Therefore, despite protests from the Patent Office that mathematics are not patentable, damn near every discrete mathematics definition and algorithm is patentable, or close enough that a the prospect of fighting a patent would scare anybody.
(And frankly, I don't think we stand a chance in Hades of convincing them otherwise. The more ignorant you are, the more you think you know on a given topic, and I'd lay money these people honestly believe they know mathematics. Which means they will not listen to people like us.)
You don't give any details of the abuse, so it makes it hard to advise specifics.
However, I'm assuming you're running some sort of service that involves a server you can program. (If this is an EZBoard being abused, which you use but don't control, you're toast.) The key is to ban the behavior, not the user. Exactly how you do that depends on the exact situation.
If someone's posting too often, make people wait at least n seconds before posting again. If they abuse that, kick the time up. And if they're posting rapid-fire, keep kicking the time up. Look into "exponential decay", it's what you're looking for. Once they cross a threshold, you may choose to ban the IP for a week and delete whatever messages were posted automatically, thus undoing the abuse automatically, which is kinda the key to this whole idea.
Think outside the "IP ban" box. What you do for other services depends. Ban behavior, not people. It's a little harder at first, but much more reliable.
Granted, most films are not "high art" (or even close to it, usually) but is the easily found "lowest common denominator" fuel going to power the Pixar machine forever?
IMHO, this is not a valid complaint. If the "lowerst common denominator" fuel is so "easy" to find, then how come Monsters, Inc. is the first film in a long time to pull it off without me, a rather sensitive person, ever feeling insulted, cheated, or ripped off?
The movie deserves more credit then to be dismissed as "lowest common denominator". I mean, come on! "Scary Movie", now that's LCD. This ain't no "Scary Movie", it's a lot better.
Exactly what did you expect, in a movie meant to at least be accessible by children? Angst? Dark imagery? Excessive ambiguity you interpret at subtlety, and pat yourself on the back for finding? Validation/challenging of your world view?
I've seen a lot of LCD crap. Monsters, Inc. is not it.
(By far the worst statements of this kind I've seen come from this Salon review, where the reviewer spends two page bitching about the movie he would rather have made, and the changes he would have made, which would have utterly destroyed the movie (and left it something else entirely), rather then actually reviewing the movie.)
False idealism doesn't get far either. "If we just keep working on the epicycles, maybe we can finally crack the orbit problem!"
They would pretend that the DVD contains a "program" which plays the "movie data"
;-)
Errrr, no, they couldn't. Even a judge can see through that one. The program is quite clearly in the player.
'Not all movies are protected by the first amendment.'
The ones Warner Brothers make are!!!
'Not all movies ARE software, because not all movies are on DVD.'
The only thing we're talking about is movies on DVD. The existance of other things doesn't much matter. It's DVD's WB wants to claim are software.
BTW, the important thing about Warner w.r.t. the DeCSS case is that they are a member of the DVD CCA (the movie / CSS people), not the RIAA (the music people). They're all evil, so it's easy to get them mixed up...
Ahhhh, frick.
And yes, 3 is weak. Like I said, the only thing we get here is an admission that *some* software is isomorphic to first-amendment protectable content. The point is that in the DeCSS case, the movie industry wants to argue that *no* software is first-amendment-protectable.
(From my weblog:) I would like to propose an interesting spin on this story: Should Warner Brothers win, then the following syllogism will hold:
- All movies are expressions that in America would be protected under the First Amendment.
- All movies are software (since all movies can be put on DVD).
- There exists at least one movie.
- Therefore, there exists software that in America would be protected under the First Amendment.
Once a single piece of software is over that line, it's going to be very, very hard to draw a line that includes movies (movies, of all things!), yet excludes other things.This story hails from Australia, not the USA, but it would still probably have some interesting ramifications, even in Australia.
Note that in particular, DeCSS, a DVD decryption program, is trying to claim software-as-expression as a defense in the USA. Warner, a member of the RIAA, has gone on record now, at least in Australia, as claiming that DVD movies are an instance of a thing that is both software and an expression protectable under the First Amendment.
The only way totalitarianism wins is if we give up challenging it in all its early manifestations
Boy, I wish it were that easy. However, in the real world, the bad guys can win, even when the good guys fight back.
I keep track of the kind of thing Cryptome covers. It affects you, after a while.
Overall, are you optimistic or pessimistic that we will eventually (call it 5-20 years) have a society that you would find reasonably acceptable? Or do you think we're destined for one form or another of effective totalitarianism?
Let's just shortcut the whole debate, OK? In the final analysis, all things are taken on faith, because none of us can be sure that our senses are telling the truth. Period.
Once you accept the reality of the outside world, if indeed you do (and if you don't, you might as well 'stop reading' now, inasmuch as that has meaning), you can reason about it.
While we can never make statements with 100% confidence, I'm certainly vastly more confident about "A large mass, which can only be a planet (basically, the definition of a planet is "a large mass in orbit around a star" (though there's more of course), is causing the star to wobble", then whatever other explanation you can come up with.
"The star wobbles for no reason, in flat contradiction to every other observed behavior of physical objects"? Sorry, that doesn't rate highly with me.
You make the classic mistake... that because nothing is 100% certain, all things are 0% certain. The logic doesn't hold; there are middle grounds, certainties between 0% and 100%, and as soon as that is true, the "either-or" breaks down. And you are thrust, kicking and screaming, back into the world the rest of us inhabit, where you actually have to decide, and act upon, what you believe to be true.
Personally, I recommend continuing to act as if gravity and intertia are true. It gets messy when you try to deny those things. I'd link the rotton.com pictures but that's probably just mean... besides, I don't particularly like looking at them.
The worst part is, did I read this in a Larry Niven novel or watch it on Discovery channel?
Both have roughly the same amount of truth to them. Larry, however, knows he's writing fiction.
Compare apples to apples, please. An "X" for a CD-ROM drive is 150KB/s. I don't know what an "X" is for a DVD drive, but I'm pretty darned certain that it's more then that, because my old "2X" DVD drive could play DVD's... and I *know* DVDs need more then 300KB/s to play correctly.
Why not re-write your post, using KB/s instead of "X"?
In fact, increasing the density of a drive often increases the possible speed of the drive. Sometimes (sometimes!) the constaining factor on a drive is how fast the media can be spun. Modern CD drives are pretty much at this limit; you just can't spin CD's reliably at "100X", even if you had the theoretical ability to read the data that fast. (Yes, I know no CD player comes even close to that speed; that's my point.) But if you spin the DVD at the same max speed a CD drive can spin a CD, then the DVD drive will be able to transfer significantly more quickly.
Rather then a "tradeoff" between speed and capacity, you usually get the opposite: Both coming at once. Esp. in the mature version of a technology, which is where we are now with CD players and either are, or will be within months, for DVD players.
Of course, you can still do it, despite those limitations. You can take the satellite up, and start boosting at the right time and slingshotting it around until you have enough energy to get to Mars, virtually for free... except for time. This would take years.
Money, money, money. It's all about money. (Same reason you can't do what a sibling of this message proposes, which is assemble it in pieces. Of course there's no technical reason that's impossible, just monetary. We have other things to do with launches then to send up a shuttle multiple times for one Mars probe.)
Why should I take that quote at face value, as you do? It comes from a guy trying to get rid of the so-called "guru"! Sources don't come more suspicious then that! Meanwhile, the empirical evidence flatly contradicts the guru status. Knowlege ain't skills!
"Guru"? Nothing he did worked. How, exactly, did this person attain "guru" status? Sure, the guy trying to get rid of him claimed he had knowlege, but why assume he had skills? (Esp. for the people posting without reading the article.)
There's an amusing stereotype at work in the posts here... we are automatically granting "guru" status because he is quirky. Sorry, I still look for skillz, and all the evidence suggests that was lacking. (Uncommented assembly may indicate guru status, but only when it works... when it doesn't work, it indicates an overestimation of personal skill. Not much middle ground here.)
The fact is that there is every bit as much room for an exceptionally talented person to bend the rules as there ever has been. Our definition of exceptionally talented is rising, though. (Besides, eccentricity itself seems to be on the decline.)
I love it how whenever someone DARES suggest the USA isn't 100% perfect, he gets flamed to pieces for being ignorant, heartless, anti-american, etc. etc.
No, no, no! That is not it at all, and I'm sick of people seeing this as so black-and-white.
The US is not 100% perfect. I'll be the first to say it. How in the hell could the US be perfect? Throughout the majority of the century, the entire world (not just the US) has been flying by the seat of its pants. How is one supposed to predict the results of actions, when all history, the only way to truly understand such things, is more-or-less irrelevent? Even the US, which at least wants to be ethical, most of the time, hasn't been perfect; at least we tried, most of the time.
What is burning our bacon is those atrophied brains ("atrophied" from thinking the same thoughts, over and over again, for the last forty years, and subsuming everything into their matrix with a religious fervor) that are declaring that the US is 100% evil, a common but amazing narrow-minded and even dangerous view. Get real! Things aren't that black-and-white in either direction.
Yet all these people have been coming out in force, after having been briefly silenced by the tragedy of the WTC (which they couldn't admit to being glad occurred). I wish they'd open their minds. It's worth observing an awful lot of them are academics with no significant real-world experience to counter-balance their own over-fitting the world to their Ivory Tower philosophies. (Look up what statistical overfitting is if you don't know what it is... the concept matches religious subsumption of reality almost precisely.) I wish they'd open their minds and their eyes, and start seeing nuances.
I award this article the Worst Slashdot Lawyers Ever award. Not a single legally valid opinion is ranked above 3. Several utterly uninformed opinions are ranked at 4 or 5. Half the replies miss the point. Absolutely amazingly horrible. A record high noise/signal ratio. Wow.
Please for Gnu's sake don't whip off a letter to your Congresscritter based on this article; most posters have already looked stupid enough.
(Oh, in case you're wondering, the subject of this article is a funny-chortle, but no more. It has all the legal force of a Taliban edict in this country.)