Why does it seem like government regulatory agencies and enforcement agencies only give a shit once it happens to whoever is in charge of them?
Sarcastic question, serious answer.
Because Sturgeon's Law (%90 of everything is crap) applies to complaints as well. When it happens to someone In Charge it provides valuable independent confirmation that the problem is indeed real. (At least, it confirms it to the person in charge; the possibility that the person in charge are themselves one of the 90% of people who are crap and are thus themselves merely another false positive still exists.)
If you don't believe this, work tech support for a while for some software used by the general public, and try to record how many calls are really, truly software or hardware bugs, and how many are simply user error. (I'll even spot you usability-based errors as software errors.) Or browse on some of the larger bug databases online. Simply evaluating a complaint can be expensive; it unavoidably requires a human to do the evaluation.
Note I'm speaking to your general complaint; perhaps this case was handled optimally, perhaps it could have been handled better. I neither know nor particularly care. I'm specifically referring to the larger complaint you made.
Yeah, but the point is that in a good implementation of such a system, no third party would be able to listen to the quantum-encrypted data without changing it - at which point Bob and Alice would know that the there was an eavesdropper (or that the system had gone bellyup).
This is why I generally insist on calling this technology "Quantum Intrusion Detection"; it adds little or nothing to the "Cryptography" aspect of the communication. It's only contribution is the ability to add 100% provable intrusion detection to the link, which means that once detected, you can shut the communication down. As I understand it, it does NOT protect the communication if you insist on continuing to send it after intrusion is detected any more then conventional cryptography does; the intercepter can get the bits (but still faces a serious problem with decrypting the communication conventionally).
Yes, it has "cryptography" as part of the technology but that's not its distinguishing feature.
This is intended as an elitist statement, it's just simple truth.
Whoops, that's "this is not intended as an elitist statement".
Because we all know that claiming to actually know more about something then somebody else will annoy some 15-year-old somewhere who knows everything. (Stupid anti-intellectualism.)
These events prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the election companies are completely trustworthy, and public officials should continue to poo-poo the concerns of people who know what they are talking about. After all,
"I don't know what the holdup is," Margaret K. Luca (D), secretary of the county's three-person elections board, said late last night. "I thought we had it covered. We tested all week in the county."
They tested the machines all last week. Obviously electronic voting is working.
(Satire aside: This points out the problem very nicely; the "secretary of the county's three-person elections board" is simply not qualified to assess the ability of a voting system to perform in advance of the actual vote. This is intended as an elitist statement, it's just simple truth. "Secretaries of county election boards" should probably put a bit more trust in the concerns thousands of knowlegable citizens have with no vested interest in selling anything, and a lot less trust in companies trying to sell them snake oil. For one thing, they obviously don't know how to test these systems, or they would have found these problems.
"Stress testing", anyone? If the news report linked to can be trusted, this was nothing more then a bog-stadard "lack of resources" issue, the kind easily diagnosed by a knowlegable tester, and fixed in advance given enough time, but something that most people have no clue about. The idea of "stress testing" may be obvious to most of us, but we are not average.)
Why pull a number out of your ass when you can pull a number off of the back of an envelope?;-)
10,000 years of the human race / 10,000,000,000 years of the sun existing =~.0001%.
I pulled the sun's age from memory and where you draw the line for "the human race" is somewhat a matter of choice, but it should be within a magnitude and a half, which is all that matters here.
Gets even worse if you want to talk about humans really observing the sun and not merely looking at it; guesstimate 100 years and drop another two factors of magnitude off that number for.000001% of the sun's life.
Re:"Low Carb" is the new "Low Fat"
on
Hackers On Atkins
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· Score: 1
The only reason diets like Atkins work at all is simple: just about everything has carbohydrates in it! There's so few things you can eat if you strictly adhere to the diet that you inevitably end up eating LESS CALORIES.
Bullshit. I've tried Atkins, you obviously haven't.
Of course, calling the Atkins diet a "low calorie diet" is silly; of COURSE it's a low calorie diet, it's just that it's a low calorie diet that doesn't involve constant, debilitating hunger. I for one can't just wave that away as an incidental detail; to me it's the thing that makes it work for me. I can't and won't be hungry every day. Calling it a lack of willpower is foolishness; when you're fighting against the very nature of neurons themselves (and conditioned responses), you're going to lose.
If you are willing to tolerate counting calories and figure out exactly what you need to maintain your desired weight, you can pretty much eat whatever you want. 100 calories of carbs = 100 calories of fat. If you're the type of person that needs a "banned foods"-type list to really feel like you're on a diet, Atkins probably is for you. If you're the type that can push away from the table - you probably don't need to do anything more than watch your calories.
You make it sound like you have some sort of choice what type you are. I won't deny I have some concious control over what I eat (after all I can choose to do Atkins), but there's nothing I can do about the fact that my body is very efficient at processing carbs into body fat, something it "perceives" as a benefit. There's nothing I can do (directly) about the fact that it insists I eat more carbohydrates to store for the upcoming winter. My wife's body does neither, and if there WAS a thin winter coming up, she'd have a hard time forcing herself to eat.
You don't understand Atkins. I don't have to count calories. Since it's what I should be eating, I eat until I'm full. Frankly, I couldn't care less how many calories are in things.
I really think at this point that excessive small-minded criticism of people who don't know Atkins, don't understand Atkins, and don't want to do either is out of line. If it were that dangerous or that bad, we'd know by now, because people have been doing it now for decades. That also gives lie to your implicit "it's just a fad" argument; it absolute does not fit the profile of a diet fad. They don't come back. I am willing to say that if Atkins is "coming back", it's because there must be something to it. If there isn't anything to it, then I defy you to explain my weight loss and consequent health benefits with "traditional theory". I should have gained weight according to it.
It's too late to dismiss it, it's working. The question to answer is "Why is it working?", not "Is it working?"
(Incidentally, since the default Slashdot position is "skeptic", which isn't all bad, chew on this: The more I learn about the "science" of nutrition, the more I realize it's not a science at all. In order to do a true controlled study of the effects of diet, you need to completely feed at least one group of your subjects (and preferably all of them) for the duration of the study, preferably many years. This is prohibitively expensive, and so is done only in the rarest of cases. Virtually no "studies" rise to the level of "true science". Just try to find the true studies that determine that "eating excessive fat is bad". Seriously, go find them. Others have very seriously tried and failed. I am no longer willing to trust the "science of nutrition" over the evidence provided by my own body, and that's because I'm a true skeptic, not despite it.)
Articles like this are damned easy to write when you simply assert the existence of a stereotype. By immediately disconnecting yourself from reality, you are then free to spout whatever meaningless rant you want.
I defy you to find someone who actually behaves like the gamer this article is ranting about, who never plays new games and never thinks they are good.
Some of us may look crotchety, but after playing games for 20 years some of us do have higher standards. And some games meet them; many don't. Guess what percentage of movies I see in the theatre, though... am I "elitist" for only watching the best (in my opinion) 1% or so?
What a pointless article. I think I'll write an article about how stupid people who eat dung as their primary food source are. Sure, they don't actually exist, but I'll get a great, if pointless, rant out of it.
Speaking as one of those who said "go after the offender", I still believe "go after the offender" is the right thing to do.
In addition, because I am capable of holding nuanced views (look it up if you have to), I also believe that the RIAA has gone about charging the offenders in a clumsy way that is causing far more problems then it is solving, and taking advantage of brutally unfair copyright laws to hit them with massive, life-breaking fines. This I do not approve of, even though I otherwise am OK with their charging the offenders directly.
I think the RIAA would be better off in every way to charge a lot of people with much smaller fines, say five or ten times the market value of the shared songs, rather then the full damages allowed under copyright law. Then the fines would be less likely to be life-altering, more likely to be paid, and would not garner as much negative publicity. "Prosecuting to the full extent of the law" is foolishness here no matter how you look at it and shows the hubris of the RIAA. They think it scares people but it just shows how out-of-touch they are.
If the penalties were more reasonable, they wouldn't provoke a backlash and we wouldn't be seeing these "public interest" stories about poor little girls being hit up for twice what they will probably make in the span of their lives.
The lawyers say "you can hit them with this" and the execs don't even consider whether they should hit them with a lesser charge... I'd like to go up against these people in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance sometime, I bet they'd suck ass. "Why would I want to do anything but use my most powerful attack?" No finesse.
Anyhoo, you don't hear from us much because we're somewhat less outraged then everybody else. (Though I'm still outraged at the way they've handled this, so no "don't you care about the children?"-type flames please.)
If it weren't inevitable that you're breaking countless patents as soon as you sit down and write a program over a couple hundred lines, this might be insane. But since the odds are effectively 100% you're violating a patent or can at least be construed as violating a patent, it makes sense to minimize claimable damages, since you can't eliminate them short of not doing anything at all. (That's hard to build a business on.)
So it's not illegal in the "it's a felony" sense, but it is illegal in the sense of "if you behave in this fashion, you will end up being legally penalized".
Incidentally, this is a classic example of why it's so hard to write laws. You can't assume that "first-order effects" will be the only effect of the law; in fact this is a case where the desired first-order effect isn't even dominant.
The obvious cause for this law to be written was to strengthen patent law by making people less likely to infringe patents by penalizing them if they do it knowingly. Instead, because of the second-order effect of people not reading patents at all in order to avoid the treble damages, the patent system is weakened by making sure nobody ever reads the patents, causing us to live in a world (after a bit more logic) where there are so many patent violations nobody even knows how many there are.
It's also easy to propose a solution to the problem on Slashdot, but a lot of them (all of them?) have equally horrid second-order effects themselves. This stuff is hard to work out.
Or wait... would infecting another planet be a bad thing?
Humanity is Mother Nature's way of getting the biosphere off of its dependence on Planet Earth. No number of dogs will ever create a thriving ecosphere on the Moon.
Environmentalists too long used the idea of "Everything Man do to environment Bad!" should be pushing for space colonization with everything they have; there's an entire dead planet right on our doorstep waiting for us to give it life. The worst case scenario for the Moon's ecosphere is for us to leave it in its "pristine" state.
God willing, the 2010's or at latest the 2020's will look like the 1960's, except instead of "free sex" it'll be civil liberties. And I hope "people over 30" will be welcome, 'cause I'll be supporting them all the way.
If it wasn't for the fact I'm not confident we could throw this yoke off once we get it stuck on ourselves (witness the inability of the Iraqis or the North Koreans to rid themselves of their regimes without external help... now what if the whole world is repressive to that degree?), I'd suggest we should push for these technologies and wait for the rebound, as a long-term play. It's a bad idea but sometimes tempts me.
Garak
(email not shown publicly) http://garak.dyndns.org/
Of course he may change this before you read it.
Obviously you do hide your email. Some of us still need to allow others to contact us. Unhide your email on Slashdot and wherever else you are, and tell me again in six months that it's only "an extra few emails to delete". For me, despite the high-volume mail lists I'm on, spam has been the majority of my email by message count for the last two months. And it's continuing to grow geometrically worse. (Exponentially is really too strong a word, but geometrically is still bad enough...)
nO no ON! aLiENS GAVE us the LASERS! MaKNind is too stoopid to invent LASERS on his own! LASERS is alien techONlogy! dON'T FALL PREY to the CABAL~!
and LASERS is nothing to th eEVLI of computeRs!
typedf quickly to minimize exposure to BRAIN BENDING RAYS!
(probably ought to post this anonymously but what the hell, I've got karma to burn on a joke that can be misinterpreted as a post by someone who means this... except if you still think I mean it after this paragraph, it's you who should be modded down...)
All one needs to do to enslave Americans is to do it in small steps, making sure that each step is the easiest thing for the victim to do at that time.
Uh huh. And everyone else is so enlightened that they always consider the long term.
Which is why so much of the world is stuck in choking poverty or brutal dictatorship; it's best in the long term. North Korea is just looking after its long term interest by tolerating their government.
Puh-lease. What you describe is a human trait. Unless you seriously want to claim that everybody in the world is superhuman (except those strangely successful Americans), you need to drop your racist ideas about America. (No, "American" isn't a race, I know that, but by your words you sure treat it like one, so I call it like it is: racism.)
I didn't invoke prisoner's dilemma because I was specifically referring to the societal level. We all benefit if we all strive for justice but the locally optimal strategy is to cheat. That's "tragedy of the commons".
"Prisoner's Dilemma" does not apply here, because there is no solution where both sides benefit from cooperation; either prosecution or defense "loses" (even if justice is served they will perceive a loss). The point of the Prisoner's Dilemma is a local optimum can be acheived with cooperation, the point of tragedy of the commons is the local optimum is acheived by cheating.
It's not a pure tragedy of the commons either because the "commons" is not being destroyed by use, it's being destroyed by abuse, which is a difference. But it's pretty close. (One could tweak the standard commons scenario to include two use options, one that does no damage to the commons, one that damages the commons but is more beneficial in the short term, rather then the standard "one type of use" formulation. It's a different problem and there are some different ramifications if you think about it, but in the common cases it's virtually identical.)
What if the "spoils" are your life savings, i.e. someone is suing you?
What if they are your life, i.e. you are on trial for a serious crime?
Then I hope and pray that my opposition doesn't employ "win at all costs".
In fact, you point out the exact reason why justice is more important then "win at all costs". It's a varient on "tragedy of the commons". It may be locally optimal for you to play "win at all costs", but when you're up for the death penalty for a crime you didn't commit, you need to live in a system that cares about justice, not winning. In a "win at all costs" system, you're screwed because you can't afford Johnny Cochran.
In the situations you mention it's more important then ever that justice be served. It's the little things like small claims court where it doesn't really matter.
The denotation may be identical but the connatation is wildly different. From the same page, lower down:
Want of feeling; privation of passion, emotion, or excitement; dispassion; -- applied either to the body or the mind. As applied to the mind, it is a
calmness, indolence, or state of indifference, incapable of being ruffled or roused to active interest or exertion by pleasure, pain, or passion. ``The apathy of despair.''
Emphasis mine.
The usual connotation of "apathy", and the way it is typically used in this context, is that people care but don't invest the time to actually do something about it. Thus the antiwar crowd insisted that almost everybody agreed with them but were just too apathetic to do anything about it. Insulting the group of people you're trying to convince and calling them things like "sheeple" does not make for a compelling case.
Instead, people weren't "apathic", people as a whole simply didn't care about the antiwar platform, for reasons that differ from person to person. This is not "apathy", this is disagreement, passive or even active.
If the RIAA makes themselves less popular than telemarketers, no amount of money will be able to keep laws like the DMCA on the books.
It's the little truths like this that help keep me optimistic about the future. The fact is that most perceived injustices in this country only continue because nobody cares, or nothing approaching a majority cares. (Not apathy, mind you, but complete lack of caring.) As soon as people care, things start happening, and to hell with the special interests, who can only really maneuver where nobody cares about. (Which is a big area.)
In fact as time goes on I get more and more suspicious about people who are so sure that what they care about is right that they are willing to throw away and actively subvert the democractic republic process. If what you call "injustice" is considered "justice" by the majority, well... it's up to you to convince us.
If I'm in a situation where I have no choice but to retain counsel, I sure as hell want an attorney who is going to win on my behalf, not fight fair. Once a matter ends up in the courts, the gloves are off.
that's the real problem.
If this attitude wasn't pervasive ("win at all costs!"), we wouldn't have scummy lawyers. The scummy lawyers are just providing the services we want.
There are some things more important then "winning". In fact, there's a lot of things more important then winning.
Having implemented document control for ISO compliance at an engineering firm that does aerospace parts, I can safely say there is no way your requirements are compatible with any software solution. You have *systematic* problems that are far greater than any humble software could aspire to solving.
Even more extra emphasis added by me, of course.
I know it's damned easy for some guy, somewhere on the Internet to say this, but you have two basic options. Either stop caring and go with the flow, or start actively hunting for a new job and get out of there ASAP. (This isn't as unrealistic as you might immediately think because you don't necessarily need said job tommorow, so you're not starving until you find it; I'm not saying quit ASAP, just get a new job.)
You could fix one. You could fix two. But any three and you're hosed. Plus 7 & 11 are intrinsically incompatible, 3 & 10 are intrinsically incompatible, 1 and 2 are both stoppers all by themselves, and 4 & 5 will practically conflict (I think you'd find out what I mean if you tried to implement that). Your organization is fundamentally sick.
If you can't stop caring because when all hell breaks loose it's your head on the block, then you need to look for a new job that much sooner. (You don't want hell to break loose before you leave because it could make the next job that much harder to find.)
You've taken step one, admit the problem. Now you need to allow the analysis to sink in.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does it seem like government regulatory agencies and enforcement agencies only give a shit once it happens to whoever is in charge of them?
Sarcastic question, serious answer.
Because Sturgeon's Law (%90 of everything is crap) applies to complaints as well. When it happens to someone In Charge it provides valuable independent confirmation that the problem is indeed real. (At least, it confirms it to the person in charge; the possibility that the person in charge are themselves one of the 90% of people who are crap and are thus themselves merely another false positive still exists.)
If you don't believe this, work tech support for a while for some software used by the general public, and try to record how many calls are really, truly software or hardware bugs, and how many are simply user error. (I'll even spot you usability-based errors as software errors.) Or browse on some of the larger bug databases online. Simply evaluating a complaint can be expensive; it unavoidably requires a human to do the evaluation.
Note I'm speaking to your general complaint; perhaps this case was handled optimally, perhaps it could have been handled better. I neither know nor particularly care. I'm specifically referring to the larger complaint you made.
Bad plan; one phrase: ICANN trademark resolution policies suck.
Better to play nice; if the lawyers come out it'll get uglyl, and not for Microsoft.
Yeah, but the point is that in a good implementation of such a system, no third party would be able to listen to the quantum-encrypted data without changing it - at which point Bob and Alice would know that the there was an eavesdropper (or that the system had gone bellyup).
This is why I generally insist on calling this technology "Quantum Intrusion Detection"; it adds little or nothing to the "Cryptography" aspect of the communication. It's only contribution is the ability to add 100% provable intrusion detection to the link, which means that once detected, you can shut the communication down. As I understand it, it does NOT protect the communication if you insist on continuing to send it after intrusion is detected any more then conventional cryptography does; the intercepter can get the bits (but still faces a serious problem with decrypting the communication conventionally).
Yes, it has "cryptography" as part of the technology but that's not its distinguishing feature.
Try again. Green is a higher frequency then red.
This is intended as an elitist statement, it's just simple truth.
Whoops, that's "this is not intended as an elitist statement".
Because we all know that claiming to actually know more about something then somebody else will annoy some 15-year-old somewhere who knows everything. (Stupid anti-intellectualism.)
These events prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the election companies are completely trustworthy, and public officials should continue to poo-poo the concerns of people who know what they are talking about. After all,They tested the machines all last week . Obviously electronic voting is working.
(Satire aside: This points out the problem very nicely; the "secretary of the county's three-person elections board" is simply not qualified to assess the ability of a voting system to perform in advance of the actual vote. This is intended as an elitist statement, it's just simple truth. "Secretaries of county election boards" should probably put a bit more trust in the concerns thousands of knowlegable citizens have with no vested interest in selling anything, and a lot less trust in companies trying to sell them snake oil. For one thing, they obviously don't know how to test these systems, or they would have found these problems.
"Stress testing", anyone? If the news report linked to can be trusted, this was nothing more then a bog-stadard "lack of resources" issue, the kind easily diagnosed by a knowlegable tester, and fixed in advance given enough time, but something that most people have no clue about. The idea of "stress testing" may be obvious to most of us, but we are not average.)
Why pull a number out of your ass when you can pull a number off of the back of an envelope? ;-)
.0001% .
.000001% of the sun's life.
10,000 years of the human race / 10,000,000,000 years of the sun existing =~
I pulled the sun's age from memory and where you draw the line for "the human race" is somewhat a matter of choice, but it should be within a magnitude and a half, which is all that matters here.
Gets even worse if you want to talk about humans really observing the sun and not merely looking at it; guesstimate 100 years and drop another two factors of magnitude off that number for
The only reason diets like Atkins work at all is simple: just about everything has carbohydrates in it! There's so few things you can eat if you strictly adhere to the diet that you inevitably end up eating LESS CALORIES.
Bullshit. I've tried Atkins, you obviously haven't.
Of course, calling the Atkins diet a "low calorie diet" is silly; of COURSE it's a low calorie diet, it's just that it's a low calorie diet that doesn't involve constant, debilitating hunger. I for one can't just wave that away as an incidental detail; to me it's the thing that makes it work for me. I can't and won't be hungry every day. Calling it a lack of willpower is foolishness; when you're fighting against the very nature of neurons themselves (and conditioned responses), you're going to lose.
If you are willing to tolerate counting calories and figure out exactly what you need to maintain your desired weight, you can pretty much eat whatever you want. 100 calories of carbs = 100 calories of fat. If you're the type of person that needs a "banned foods"-type list to really feel like you're on a diet, Atkins probably is for you. If you're the type that can push away from the table - you probably don't need to do anything more than watch your calories.
You make it sound like you have some sort of choice what type you are. I won't deny I have some concious control over what I eat (after all I can choose to do Atkins), but there's nothing I can do about the fact that my body is very efficient at processing carbs into body fat, something it "perceives" as a benefit. There's nothing I can do (directly) about the fact that it insists I eat more carbohydrates to store for the upcoming winter. My wife's body does neither, and if there WAS a thin winter coming up, she'd have a hard time forcing herself to eat.
You don't understand Atkins. I don't have to count calories. Since it's what I should be eating, I eat until I'm full. Frankly, I couldn't care less how many calories are in things.
I really think at this point that excessive small-minded criticism of people who don't know Atkins, don't understand Atkins, and don't want to do either is out of line. If it were that dangerous or that bad, we'd know by now, because people have been doing it now for decades. That also gives lie to your implicit "it's just a fad" argument; it absolute does not fit the profile of a diet fad. They don't come back. I am willing to say that if Atkins is "coming back", it's because there must be something to it. If there isn't anything to it, then I defy you to explain my weight loss and consequent health benefits with "traditional theory". I should have gained weight according to it.
It's too late to dismiss it, it's working. The question to answer is "Why is it working?", not "Is it working?"
(Incidentally, since the default Slashdot position is "skeptic", which isn't all bad, chew on this: The more I learn about the "science" of nutrition, the more I realize it's not a science at all. In order to do a true controlled study of the effects of diet, you need to completely feed at least one group of your subjects (and preferably all of them) for the duration of the study, preferably many years. This is prohibitively expensive, and so is done only in the rarest of cases. Virtually no "studies" rise to the level of "true science". Just try to find the true studies that determine that "eating excessive fat is bad". Seriously, go find them. Others have very seriously tried and failed. I am no longer willing to trust the "science of nutrition" over the evidence provided by my own body, and that's because I'm a true skeptic, not despite it.)
Articles like this are damned easy to write when you simply assert the existence of a stereotype. By immediately disconnecting yourself from reality, you are then free to spout whatever meaningless rant you want.
I defy you to find someone who actually behaves like the gamer this article is ranting about, who never plays new games and never thinks they are good.
Some of us may look crotchety, but after playing games for 20 years some of us do have higher standards. And some games meet them; many don't. Guess what percentage of movies I see in the theatre, though... am I "elitist" for only watching the best (in my opinion) 1% or so?
What a pointless article. I think I'll write an article about how stupid people who eat dung as their primary food source are. Sure, they don't actually exist, but I'll get a great, if pointless, rant out of it.
Much is made of the disparity of force between the parties, but nothing of the disparity of *culture*.
That's a nice way to look at it; cool. Kinda what I was hinting at with the tactical arguments; they don't understand their opponents.
Speaking as one of those who said "go after the offender", I still believe "go after the offender" is the right thing to do.
In addition, because I am capable of holding nuanced views (look it up if you have to), I also believe that the RIAA has gone about charging the offenders in a clumsy way that is causing far more problems then it is solving, and taking advantage of brutally unfair copyright laws to hit them with massive, life-breaking fines. This I do not approve of, even though I otherwise am OK with their charging the offenders directly.
I think the RIAA would be better off in every way to charge a lot of people with much smaller fines, say five or ten times the market value of the shared songs, rather then the full damages allowed under copyright law. Then the fines would be less likely to be life-altering, more likely to be paid, and would not garner as much negative publicity. "Prosecuting to the full extent of the law" is foolishness here no matter how you look at it and shows the hubris of the RIAA. They think it scares people but it just shows how out-of-touch they are.
If the penalties were more reasonable, they wouldn't provoke a backlash and we wouldn't be seeing these "public interest" stories about poor little girls being hit up for twice what they will probably make in the span of their lives.
The lawyers say "you can hit them with this" and the execs don't even consider whether they should hit them with a lesser charge... I'd like to go up against these people in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance sometime, I bet they'd suck ass. "Why would I want to do anything but use my most powerful attack?" No finesse.
Anyhoo, you don't hear from us much because we're somewhat less outraged then everybody else. (Though I'm still outraged at the way they've handled this, so no "don't you care about the children? "-type flames please.)
Yeah, it's just so easy when it all fits cleanly into one paragraph and a one sentence quote, yes?
Are they saying it's somehow illegal for Company A to read Company B's patents?
It's not illegal in the normal sense, but willful infringement makes it much easier for the patent owner to claim triple damages. Thus, you're better off never reading patents so you can honestly claim ignorance if you charged with infringement.
If it weren't inevitable that you're breaking countless patents as soon as you sit down and write a program over a couple hundred lines, this might be insane. But since the odds are effectively 100% you're violating a patent or can at least be construed as violating a patent, it makes sense to minimize claimable damages, since you can't eliminate them short of not doing anything at all. (That's hard to build a business on.)
So it's not illegal in the "it's a felony" sense, but it is illegal in the sense of "if you behave in this fashion, you will end up being legally penalized".
Incidentally, this is a classic example of why it's so hard to write laws. You can't assume that "first-order effects" will be the only effect of the law; in fact this is a case where the desired first-order effect isn't even dominant.
The obvious cause for this law to be written was to strengthen patent law by making people less likely to infringe patents by penalizing them if they do it knowingly. Instead, because of the second-order effect of people not reading patents at all in order to avoid the treble damages, the patent system is weakened by making sure nobody ever reads the patents, causing us to live in a world (after a bit more logic) where there are so many patent violations nobody even knows how many there are.
It's also easy to propose a solution to the problem on Slashdot, but a lot of them (all of them?) have equally horrid second-order effects themselves. This stuff is hard to work out.
Or wait... would infecting another planet be a bad thing?
Humanity is Mother Nature's way of getting the biosphere off of its dependence on Planet Earth. No number of dogs will ever create a thriving ecosphere on the Moon.
Environmentalists too long used the idea of "Everything Man do to environment Bad!" should be pushing for space colonization with everything they have; there's an entire dead planet right on our doorstep waiting for us to give it life. The worst case scenario for the Moon's ecosphere is for us to leave it in its "pristine" state.
God willing, the 2010's or at latest the 2020's will look like the 1960's, except instead of "free sex" it'll be civil liberties. And I hope "people over 30" will be welcome, 'cause I'll be supporting them all the way.
If it wasn't for the fact I'm not confident we could throw this yoke off once we get it stuck on ourselves (witness the inability of the Iraqis or the North Koreans to rid themselves of their regimes without external help... now what if the whole world is repressive to that degree?), I'd suggest we should push for these technologies and wait for the rebound, as a long-term play. It's a bad idea but sometimes tempts me.
Obviously you do hide your email. Some of us still need to allow others to contact us. Unhide your email on Slashdot and wherever else you are, and tell me again in six months that it's only "an extra few emails to delete". For me, despite the high-volume mail lists I'm on, spam has been the majority of my email by message count for the last two months. And it's continuing to grow geometrically worse. (Exponentially is really too strong a word, but geometrically is still bad enough...)
Please don't hate me, my brain was bENt. rAYS SEEPED THROUGH MY HAT!!!!. ;-)
discovered lasers.
nO no ON! aLiENS GAVE us the LASERS! MaKNind is too stoopid to invent LASERS on his own! LASERS is alien techONlogy! dON'T FALL PREY to the CABAL~!
and LASERS is nothing to th eEVLI of computeRs!
typedf quickly to minimize exposure to BRAIN BENDING RAYS!
(probably ought to post this anonymously but what the hell, I've got karma to burn on a joke that can be misinterpreted as a post by someone who means this... except if you still think I mean it after this paragraph, it's you who should be modded down...)
All one needs to do to enslave Americans is to do it in small steps, making sure that each step is the easiest thing for the victim to do at that time.
Uh huh. And everyone else is so enlightened that they always consider the long term.
Which is why so much of the world is stuck in choking poverty or brutal dictatorship; it's best in the long term. North Korea is just looking after its long term interest by tolerating their government.
Puh-lease. What you describe is a human trait. Unless you seriously want to claim that everybody in the world is superhuman (except those strangely successful Americans), you need to drop your racist ideas about America. (No, "American" isn't a race, I know that, but by your words you sure treat it like one, so I call it like it is: racism.)
I didn't invoke prisoner's dilemma because I was specifically referring to the societal level. We all benefit if we all strive for justice but the locally optimal strategy is to cheat. That's "tragedy of the commons".
"Prisoner's Dilemma" does not apply here, because there is no solution where both sides benefit from cooperation; either prosecution or defense "loses" (even if justice is served they will perceive a loss). The point of the Prisoner's Dilemma is a local optimum can be acheived with cooperation, the point of tragedy of the commons is the local optimum is acheived by cheating.
It's not a pure tragedy of the commons either because the "commons" is not being destroyed by use, it's being destroyed by abuse, which is a difference. But it's pretty close. (One could tweak the standard commons scenario to include two use options, one that does no damage to the commons, one that damages the commons but is more beneficial in the short term, rather then the standard "one type of use" formulation. It's a different problem and there are some different ramifications if you think about it, but in the common cases it's virtually identical.)
In fact, you point out the exact reason why justice is more important then "win at all costs". It's a varient on "tragedy of the commons". It may be locally optimal for you to play "win at all costs", but when you're up for the death penalty for a crime you didn't commit, you need to live in a system that cares about justice, not winning. In a "win at all costs" system, you're screwed because you can't afford Johnny Cochran.
In the situations you mention it's more important then ever that justice be served. It's the little things like small claims court where it doesn't really matter.
The usual connotation of "apathy", and the way it is typically used in this context, is that people care but don't invest the time to actually do something about it. Thus the antiwar crowd insisted that almost everybody agreed with them but were just too apathetic to do anything about it. Insulting the group of people you're trying to convince and calling them things like "sheeple" does not make for a compelling case.
Instead, people weren't "apathic", people as a whole simply didn't care about the antiwar platform, for reasons that differ from person to person. This is not "apathy", this is disagreement, passive or even active.
I stand by my word choice.
If the RIAA makes themselves less popular than telemarketers, no amount of money will be able to keep laws like the DMCA on the books.
It's the little truths like this that help keep me optimistic about the future. The fact is that most perceived injustices in this country only continue because nobody cares, or nothing approaching a majority cares. (Not apathy, mind you, but complete lack of caring.) As soon as people care, things start happening, and to hell with the special interests, who can only really maneuver where nobody cares about. (Which is a big area.)
In fact as time goes on I get more and more suspicious about people who are so sure that what they care about is right that they are willing to throw away and actively subvert the democractic republic process. If what you call "injustice" is considered "justice" by the majority, well... it's up to you to convince us.
If this attitude wasn't pervasive ("win at all costs!"), we wouldn't have scummy lawyers. The scummy lawyers are just providing the services we want.
There are some things more important then "winning". In fact, there's a lot of things more important then winning.
Having implemented document control for ISO compliance at an engineering firm that does aerospace parts, I can safely say there is no way your requirements are compatible with any software solution. You have *systematic* problems that are far greater than any humble software could aspire to solving.
Even more extra emphasis added by me, of course.
I know it's damned easy for some guy, somewhere on the Internet to say this, but you have two basic options. Either stop caring and go with the flow, or start actively hunting for a new job and get out of there ASAP. (This isn't as unrealistic as you might immediately think because you don't necessarily need said job tommorow, so you're not starving until you find it; I'm not saying quit ASAP, just get a new job.)
You could fix one. You could fix two. But any three and you're hosed. Plus 7 & 11 are intrinsically incompatible, 3 & 10 are intrinsically incompatible, 1 and 2 are both stoppers all by themselves, and 4 & 5 will practically conflict (I think you'd find out what I mean if you tried to implement that). Your organization is fundamentally sick.
If you can't stop caring because when all hell breaks loose it's your head on the block, then you need to look for a new job that much sooner. (You don't want hell to break loose before you leave because it could make the next job that much harder to find.)
You've taken step one, admit the problem. Now you need to allow the analysis to sink in.