The answer to the question turned out to be giving about $3000 to a good lawyer. They took care of the rest. On an $80k/year software license, the $3000 is money well spent.
It's fine to insist that political speech is free speech and protected by the First Amendment, but there's no basis for claiming that it is "more free" than commercial speech. The First Amendment does not make such a distinction, and it would set a very bad precedent if the courts decided that commercial speech was less protected.
The supreme court has interpreted the first amendment to make some speech more free than other speech in the past (and rightly so), so why do you think that political speech may not be more free than commercial speech? Clearly if some speech is more free than other speech it is possible that political speech may be more or less free than any other type of speech acording to the court. I am not aware if any case law specifically mentions political speech vs. other types (anybody?), but distinctions have been made in the past so there's no reason to believe they won't be again.
What would be next? Deciding that personal speech is less protected than commercial speech? Distinguishing between different kinds of commercial speech, with some more protected than others? I shudder to think of where this could lead.
It's more likely they'd decide that personal speech is more free than commercial speech, and not the other way around. Some commercial speech is already more free than other commercial speech. Not all speech is free in the US, and it hasn't lead down the evil road you shudder to think about (at least not yet).
Of course this is the same editor which the author stopped working on because the event handlers needed to be reentrant as of MacOS 10.2, and it was going to be difficult to make this change for some reason. Making an event handler reentrant is a piece of cake. Take a lock at the begining, and release it at the end. Sure, they'll be serialized, but they were before too, right? If the Pepper code is so messed up that you can't easily make the event handlers reentrant then the code is probably best put in the bit bucket.
Who needs it anymore anyway? Xemacs and GNU emacs now both run on MacOS X. Save your $10k.
conspiracy
n: a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act [syn: {confederacy}]
also: A combination of men for an evil purpose; an agreement, between two or more persons, to commit a crime in concert, as treason;
...but lets move past the pedantry since neither of us will produce a definition of 'evil' or 'crime' that will satisfy the other due to the inherant subjectiveness. Instead we'll move on to undeniable facts. First, due to all the reasons mentioned in your original post, and what I pointed out in mine, none of our high ranking government officials will benifit financially from a war (or any specific political decision) and get away with it. Period. There are too many eyes watching. They may try it, but if they do they will be caught, and they will fail. Second, George W. Bush does not say that he wants to invade Iraq for humanitarian reasons. He doesn't even say he wants to invade them. He wants to confiscate and destroy their weapons, using war if necissary. Humanitarianism is an afterthought. Using war may or may not be the preferred method, but the administration says it isn't, only the people who report on presidential agenda while adding spin say that war is top priority.
Ah yes. This type of argument is very popular in the USA these days isn't it? "Since campaign contributions are public knowledge, they're not bribes are they? It's not corruption, like in foreign places".
That's not a popular argument as far as I'm aware, and it has little to do with what we were saying. The bulk of your "conspiracy proof" was describing key official's former employment. Having held a job in the past is hardly a bribe, now is it? And where do you think those campaign dollars come from? They don't appear magically. They come from investors and from you. You never thought about it that way though... Powering that computer with solar? I didn't think so.You can't reap the benifits and bitch about the outcome at the same time. If there's a conspiracy you're in on it.
How does all that have anything to do with conspiracy? Since all that is public knowledge, you're entire post is a fairly good argument that there isn't some massive conspiracy in the current administration.
When you're in your 50's or 60's what will you have done that'll make you look bad out of context? Post your real name so I can see what I can dig up.
Tripwire basically does business by cold calling companies and trying to get in touch with somebody that has the correct ballance of knowledge to spending authority. They then try to convince this stupid person with the checkbook that their company is going to be hacked off the face of the earth if you don't buy. Then, if you still say no, they keep calling back once a month trying to find somebody else who will say yes, but with a line that goes something like "We were in discussions already with person x at your company, and you just weren't ready to buy yet, and we'd like to see if you're ready to go forward." Blech. Telemarketing sucks.
Really, anybody who cares about MacOS X security updates finds out about them as soon as the software update window pops up automatically telling you to download it. In fact, I'd wager that the person who posted this found out that exact way. So, my question is why is there a slashdot story for every MacOS update when everybody who cares (Read:people with macs) find out automatically anyway? There's got to be some real news to post...
If you can hack into a power/water plant and make it not be happy, life becomes very bad.
I'm tired of hearing this crap spouted by the media and parroted by people who listen. This type of thing isn't going to happen, and it's not because we have amazing security, or because the hackers aren't smart enough, it's simply because these critical systems are not attached to the global network in any significant way. If they were on the net, sure we'd have to worry about them, but sensitive systems like this are connected through private leased lines, and there is a physical aspect to any successful attack scenario.
I know you're just trolling here, but the real issue is not that some features aren't as good, it's that Nvidia just didn't bother to implement something that ATI and Matrox did implement and is part of the DirectX 9.0 spec. Namely hardware displacement mapping. Hard for it to work on the GeForce FX and not on the Radeon when Nvidia didn't even implement it, huh?
God I'm tired of people liking things because they're a fanboy for the brand.
I don't understand why people actully consider this a feature.
Woohoo, My driver is 90% code bloat because it supports 10 other cards too!
Also, have you ever looked at the code for a driver that supports many revs of a chip? Lets just say that I'll be impressed if nvidia can keep it up forever.
In other news, pine would have done this years ago had it truly been free software. Since they don't allow people to distribute modified versions, and they don't like to accept featere enhancements nobody does any work on it. For that reason, everybody with the patience to look for and learn something better has moved on to other text based mail clients.
My freshman year of college (7 years ago) I was selling computers to small companies. I'd buy them on my credit card and pay it all off at the end of the month when I got paid from the company I was selling to. I did ~ $150,000 in business that year, and by the end of the year my credit card limit was over $65k!
Long story short: Buy lots of stuff on your credit card, and pay it off in full every month and you can have an astronomical limit within a year.
Unless of course that smell permeating from this story is BS and johnnylaw will come bangin on your door, in which case, nevermind.
He probably works in a college library at a school that has a Microsoft Campus License. Those licenses are almost always implemented by haveing the library sign out CD copies. The school I went to had this program, and the disks got trashed all the time. We probably spend a couple of hundred dollars a semester replacing the disks.
Anyway, I believe he's telling the truth about it being legit. What he's trying to do is probably a lost cause though. Best bet: Get a duplicating machine and make 50-100 copies of everything. Suck it up and waste a few hundred bucks on blanks.
Fundamentalist "Christians" are not a tiny minority in the United States.
Yeah, but the ones that think jews should convert or die are. I'd bet there's less than 100,000 of them in the US, and they're spread out, so they don't really have a giant influence on very many electoral votes.
Bush is the president solely because Al Gore is so clueless when it comes to what he should say and he should not say. Al Gore said that he supported "a woman's right to choose". That killed his chances with a lot of Christians and a lot of "Christians".
There are way more things Al Gore said to loose votes than that. Ever read his book? Do you really want to live in a world like the one he wants? I think it's scarry.
Personally I think Bush is doing a fairly good job overall. There are a few things that piss me off, but nobody's completely perfect. The only thing that really bothers me is that he's ignoring some importand domestic issues because he's too preocupied with Iraq. He should be pushing his energy plan and overcoming all the undue negative press it was given.
Someone with some understanding of the issues, for example Bill Clinton, would not make such strong statements about something over which he has no control.
There's something to be said for conviction, which is something President Clinton was lacking. Fortunatly for him, a president that didn't really do anything was exactly what the country was looking for at the time; Otherwise we may have elected Perot!
Abortion rights in the U.S. are determined by the Supreme Court. A president has little immediate influence.
People who say "I vote pro-(life|choice)" annoy the hell out of me. A narrow minded view doesn't do anybody any good. Someday a mentailty like that really may get us elected leaders who will want the jews to convert or die. That should be something people pay attention to instead of blindly voting pro-(choice|life).
And "theft" is the legal definition to describe the situation.
No matter what you think of his argument, "theft" isn't a legal description of anything. The laws are more specific than that. You have "burgulary," "shoplitfing," and generally a different name for "theft" depending on what you steal. If you "steal" music by distributing it over the internet, the original poster is very correct in saying that the crime you would be charged for is "copyright infringement." Wether you call that "theft" or not is entirely subjective and unrelated to the law.
If you go by Websters 1913, however, it's not theft unless you are "taking and removing... [property], with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same." Since you're copying, it's more like forgery than theft.
Not nessisarily, refer to my other reply somewhere in this thread regarding sectional checksums. Basically a scheme for the XBL server to query for specific sector-sector checksums at random. Coudl even happen durring disk-idle times while the game is playing to prevent some kind of "swap-for-a-cheat-disk" method.
This would be very unreliable if a cheat only changed a few bytes, which is very common with cheats. There would be other ways around it too. Hijacking the checkum routine and calculating the checksum based on the real data for instance. It also wouldn't stop things like locked memory value cheats which are popular, and don't require any changes to the media, and could be done with just a firmware change.
What's wrong with modding my box if the games I play online are checked for validity and fairness anyways?
If the box is modified there's no sure way to guarantee fairness. Even with checksums, what if you modded the box to calculate the checksums from the real disk in a second drive. It's just IDE. I think the heavy handed aproach is the only real way to stop cheaters, and as a nice side effect it punishes people for doing something they have other problems with. Seriously, if somebody doesn't like it they can just go get a PS2 instead.
Sure, you can look at it that way, but then every other tiny minority elected him too. It's all the votes that count, not just the ones that put you over the top.
I believe these people exist. Hell, I know a few people who would claim to believe that, but given enough time I'll show you several people who strongly believe just about anything. Just because these people exist doesn't mean they dictate presidential policy. We sent just as much money over there when we had Clinton as president and we do now. It's certainly not because this silly minority of hateful "Christians" bought Bush the whitehouse.
Microsoft implements a disk checksuming feature which ensures the copy of the game you are playing on your modded X-Box is authentic according to their database.
You do realize that checksuming the disk would require reading the entire disk, right? Do you have any idea how long that would take? It would be great for customer satisfaction. Xbox Live, now with 20 minute load times!
MS doesn't want to piss of content providers by allowing region coding to be broken. Nor is it willing to show that it will tollerate bending the rules of the DMCA, for any reason, valid or otherwise.
If this was true, why wouldn't they just do something like what DirecTV does and actualy disable the hardware?
There aren't many things that I typically defend Microsoft for, but I think they're doing the right thing here. You can mod you box, but then you can't use it with their online service. What's wrong with that?
That's the most rediculous thing I've heard in a long time. (I'll leave it to you to decide wether I'm talking about your conspiracy theory, or your use of "60 Minutes" as evidence.)
Better look out. Now that you're on to their conspiracy they're coming to get you.
That's bullshit. First of all I don't use it for games. Second of all they say that the driver is stable and supported. Go back to your little troll hell and STFU.
Let's stop trying to figure out solutions for possible scenarios, and start building a world that's actually worth saving.
If the world is not worth saving why don't you just kill yourself? Seriously, this is not a troll or flamebait. I really want to know the answer. Why not?
Sports heros are paid millions of dollars a year... each... and most teachers are living hand to mouth.
Why don't you stop comparing apples to oranges? Due to union contracts, some teachers are extremely overpaid compared to others who get screwed. Why don't you fix that problem first? Teachers teach our children that once High School is over, your life is going to suck. Work is going to suck. The only thing you'll have to look forward to after the prom and the homecoming football game is the weekend on the couch with a beer and sports on TV. Nobody teaches children that a job can be fun. You wonder why people choose to give their money to athletes instead of teachers? Please, spare me. This is not a wealth redistribution problem like you imply. It's a social engineering problem, and any solution will take generations to work. If you treat it as some moral injustice you'll just perpetuate the cycle or move the problem elsewhere.
Doctors are taught never to identify with the person behind the disease they're treating.
I fail to see how this is bad. Would the world be a better place if all of our doctors were clinically depressed and in institutions after a few years of service? Due to human nature our society depends on objectivity to survive. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. Sometimes an individual has to be sacraficed for the good of the many. Sometimes you just can't save sombody. It sucks, but that's life. You have to distance yourself at a personal level from the reality if you want to maintain your sanity and continue to make good decisions.
Racism is rampant, keeping certain people from getting ahead just because of where their family comes from. In Ireland, people are killed over how to worship the same god.
Hard work can solve this problem? I doubt it. We've worked at it hard for centuries. These problems will not go away until people are willing to throw away their culture. Ironically, the same people who are interested in seeing problems like this solved are the same types of people who go out of their way to preserve cultures that are dying. Racial and religious barriers that have been overcome have been overcome at the expense of the culture of both sides. I think it's a great tradeoff, but do you? Does everybody?
In China, female children are thrown in the river because of a phallocentric ideology.
Here's another one where you have to make a choice between forgetting a culture to save lives, or preserving our history. No, you can't do both. Does the answer seem so obvious anymore? How many lives would be lost to get people who are so bound to cultural expectations that they would drown their own child to abandon that culture?
Now that I've been antagonizing you, here's the real point. Even with all those problems, do we still need to give up on stopping big rocks from killing us? Aren't there enough people on this planet such that plenty of people can work on all the problems? Can we a s a society persue multiple goals at the same time? If not, why not tackle the problems we know we can find an answer to (moving big rocks) while we're still coming to terms with the realities of the problems that don't have answers everybody will agree with (see above).
The reason that some people write their best code at 4:27 in the morning is because they slack off and don't do their homework until 4:00 AM the night before it's due, and it therefore becomes the only code they're writing. If it's the only code, it must be the bset code.
Look at it again in 6 years when you know what you're doing and see if it still seems so good. I know I'm embarrased by what I though was good code back then.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to the question turned out to be giving about $3000 to a good lawyer. They took care of the rest. On an $80k/year software license, the $3000 is money well spent.
It's fine to insist that political speech is free speech and protected by the First Amendment, but there's no basis for claiming that it is "more free" than commercial speech. The First Amendment does not make such a distinction, and it would set a very bad precedent if the courts decided that commercial speech was less protected.
The supreme court has interpreted the first amendment to make some speech more free than other speech in the past (and rightly so), so why do you think that political speech may not be more free than commercial speech? Clearly if some speech is more free than other speech it is possible that political speech may be more or less free than any other type of speech acording to the court. I am not aware if any case law specifically mentions political speech vs. other types (anybody?), but distinctions have been made in the past so there's no reason to believe they won't be again.
What would be next? Deciding that personal speech is less protected than commercial speech? Distinguishing between different kinds of commercial speech, with some more protected than others? I shudder to think of where this could lead.
It's more likely they'd decide that personal speech is more free than commercial speech, and not the other way around. Some commercial speech is already more free than other commercial speech. Not all speech is free in the US, and it hasn't lead down the evil road you shudder to think about (at least not yet).
-- Offtopic --
Woohoo! Post 1000!
Of course this is the same editor which the author stopped working on because the event handlers needed to be reentrant as of MacOS 10.2, and it was going to be difficult to make this change for some reason. Making an event handler reentrant is a piece of cake. Take a lock at the begining, and release it at the end. Sure, they'll be serialized, but they were before too, right? If the Pepper code is so messed up that you can't easily make the event handlers reentrant then the code is probably best put in the bit bucket.
Who needs it anymore anyway? Xemacs and GNU emacs now both run on MacOS X. Save your $10k.
conspiracy
n: a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act [syn: {confederacy}]
also: A combination of men for an evil purpose; an agreement, between two or more persons, to commit a crime in concert, as treason;
Ah yes. This type of argument is very popular in the USA these days isn't it? "Since campaign contributions are public knowledge, they're not bribes are they? It's not corruption, like in foreign places".
That's not a popular argument as far as I'm aware, and it has little to do with what we were saying. The bulk of your "conspiracy proof" was describing key official's former employment. Having held a job in the past is hardly a bribe, now is it? And where do you think those campaign dollars come from? They don't appear magically. They come from investors and from you. You never thought about it that way though... Powering that computer with solar? I didn't think so.You can't reap the benifits and bitch about the outcome at the same time. If there's a conspiracy you're in on it.
How does all that have anything to do with conspiracy? Since all that is public knowledge, you're entire post is a fairly good argument that there isn't some massive conspiracy in the current administration.
When you're in your 50's or 60's what will you have done that'll make you look bad out of context? Post your real name so I can see what I can dig up.
set menu open delays to zero milliseconds
Menu open delays... Now there's innovation. What I want to know is how much Intel paid them to ad that "feature."
Tripwire basically does business by cold calling companies and trying to get in touch with somebody that has the correct ballance of knowledge to spending authority. They then try to convince this stupid person with the checkbook that their company is going to be hacked off the face of the earth if you don't buy. Then, if you still say no, they keep calling back once a month trying to find somebody else who will say yes, but with a line that goes something like "We were in discussions already with person x at your company, and you just weren't ready to buy yet, and we'd like to see if you're ready to go forward." Blech. Telemarketing sucks.
Really, anybody who cares about MacOS X security updates finds out about them as soon as the software update window pops up automatically telling you to download it. In fact, I'd wager that the person who posted this found out that exact way. So, my question is why is there a slashdot story for every MacOS update when everybody who cares (Read:people with macs) find out automatically anyway? There's got to be some real news to post...
If it wasn't profitable for the companies that advertise using spam, then they wouldn't do it.
That's true, but there are alot of companies that'll have to learn that the hard way before this guy stops making money.
If you can hack into a power/water plant and make it not be happy, life becomes very bad.
I'm tired of hearing this crap spouted by the media and parroted by people who listen. This type of thing isn't going to happen, and it's not because we have amazing security, or because the hackers aren't smart enough, it's simply because these critical systems are not attached to the global network in any significant way. If they were on the net, sure we'd have to worry about them, but sensitive systems like this are connected through private leased lines, and there is a physical aspect to any successful attack scenario.
I know you're just trolling here, but the real issue is not that some features aren't as good, it's that Nvidia just didn't bother to implement something that ATI and Matrox did implement and is part of the DirectX 9.0 spec. Namely hardware displacement mapping. Hard for it to work on the GeForce FX and not on the Radeon when Nvidia didn't even implement it, huh?
God I'm tired of people liking things because they're a fanboy for the brand.
unifed drivers
I don't understand why people actully consider this a feature.
Woohoo, My driver is 90% code bloat because it supports 10 other cards too!
Also, have you ever looked at the code for a driver that supports many revs of a chip? Lets just say that I'll be impressed if nvidia can keep it up forever.
In other news, pine would have done this years ago had it truly been free software. Since they don't allow people to distribute modified versions, and they don't like to accept featere enhancements nobody does any work on it. For that reason, everybody with the patience to look for and learn something better has moved on to other text based mail clients.
My freshman year of college (7 years ago) I was selling computers to small companies. I'd buy them on my credit card and pay it all off at the end of the month when I got paid from the company I was selling to. I did ~ $150,000 in business that year, and by the end of the year my credit card limit was over $65k!
Long story short: Buy lots of stuff on your credit card, and pay it off in full every month and you can have an astronomical limit within a year.
Unless of course that smell permeating from this story is BS and johnnylaw will come bangin on your door, in which case, nevermind.
He probably works in a college library at a school that has a Microsoft Campus License. Those licenses are almost always implemented by haveing the library sign out CD copies. The school I went to had this program, and the disks got trashed all the time. We probably spend a couple of hundred dollars a semester replacing the disks.
Anyway, I believe he's telling the truth about it being legit. What he's trying to do is probably a lost cause though. Best bet: Get a duplicating machine and make 50-100 copies of everything. Suck it up and waste a few hundred bucks on blanks.
Fundamentalist "Christians" are not a tiny minority in the United States.
Yeah, but the ones that think jews should convert or die are. I'd bet there's less than 100,000 of them in the US, and they're spread out, so they don't really have a giant influence on very many electoral votes.
Bush is the president solely because Al Gore is so clueless when it comes to what he should say and he should not say. Al Gore said that he supported "a woman's right to choose". That killed his chances with a lot of Christians and a lot of "Christians".
There are way more things Al Gore said to loose votes than that. Ever read his book? Do you really want to live in a world like the one he wants? I think it's scarry.
Personally I think Bush is doing a fairly good job overall. There are a few things that piss me off, but nobody's completely perfect. The only thing that really bothers me is that he's ignoring some importand domestic issues because he's too preocupied with Iraq. He should be pushing his energy plan and overcoming all the undue negative press it was given.
Someone with some understanding of the issues, for example Bill Clinton, would not make such strong statements about something over which he has no control.
There's something to be said for conviction, which is something President Clinton was lacking. Fortunatly for him, a president that didn't really do anything was exactly what the country was looking for at the time; Otherwise we may have elected Perot!
Abortion rights in the U.S. are determined by the Supreme Court. A president has little immediate influence.
People who say "I vote pro-(life|choice)" annoy the hell out of me. A narrow minded view doesn't do anybody any good. Someday a mentailty like that really may get us elected leaders who will want the jews to convert or die. That should be something people pay attention to instead of blindly voting pro-(choice|life).
And "theft" is the legal definition to describe the situation.
... [property], with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same." Since you're copying, it's more like forgery than theft.
No matter what you think of his argument, "theft" isn't a legal description of anything. The laws are more specific than that. You have "burgulary," "shoplitfing," and generally a different name for "theft" depending on what you steal. If you "steal" music by distributing it over the internet, the original poster is very correct in saying that the crime you would be charged for is "copyright infringement." Wether you call that "theft" or not is entirely subjective and unrelated to the law.
If you go by Websters 1913, however, it's not theft unless you are "taking and removing
Not nessisarily, refer to my other reply somewhere in this thread regarding sectional checksums. Basically a scheme for the XBL server to query for specific sector-sector checksums at random. Coudl even happen durring disk-idle times while the game is playing to prevent some kind of "swap-for-a-cheat-disk" method.
This would be very unreliable if a cheat only changed a few bytes, which is very common with cheats. There would be other ways around it too. Hijacking the checkum routine and calculating the checksum based on the real data for instance. It also wouldn't stop things like locked memory value cheats which are popular, and don't require any changes to the media, and could be done with just a firmware change.
What's wrong with modding my box if the games I play online are checked for validity and fairness anyways?
If the box is modified there's no sure way to guarantee fairness. Even with checksums, what if you modded the box to calculate the checksums from the real disk in a second drive. It's just IDE. I think the heavy handed aproach is the only real way to stop cheaters, and as a nice side effect it punishes people for doing something they have other problems with. Seriously, if somebody doesn't like it they can just go get a PS2 instead.
Sure, you can look at it that way, but then every other tiny minority elected him too. It's all the votes that count, not just the ones that put you over the top.
I believe these people exist. Hell, I know a few people who would claim to believe that, but given enough time I'll show you several people who strongly believe just about anything. Just because these people exist doesn't mean they dictate presidential policy. We sent just as much money over there when we had Clinton as president and we do now. It's certainly not because this silly minority of hateful "Christians" bought Bush the whitehouse.
Microsoft implements a disk checksuming feature which ensures the copy of the game you are playing on your modded X-Box is authentic according to their database.
You do realize that checksuming the disk would require reading the entire disk, right? Do you have any idea how long that would take? It would be great for customer satisfaction. Xbox Live, now with 20 minute load times!
MS doesn't want to piss of content providers by allowing region coding to be broken. Nor is it willing to show that it will tollerate bending the rules of the DMCA, for any reason, valid or otherwise.
If this was true, why wouldn't they just do something like what DirecTV does and actualy disable the hardware?
There aren't many things that I typically defend Microsoft for, but I think they're doing the right thing here. You can mod you box, but then you can't use it with their online service. What's wrong with that?
That's the most rediculous thing I've heard in a long time. (I'll leave it to you to decide wether I'm talking about your conspiracy theory, or your use of "60 Minutes" as evidence.)
Better look out. Now that you're on to their conspiracy they're coming to get you.
That's bullshit. First of all I don't use it for games. Second of all they say that the driver is stable and supported. Go back to your little troll hell and STFU.
Let's stop trying to figure out solutions for possible scenarios, and start building a world that's actually worth saving.
If the world is not worth saving why don't you just kill yourself? Seriously, this is not a troll or flamebait. I really want to know the answer. Why not?
Sports heros are paid millions of dollars a year... each... and most teachers are living hand to mouth.
Why don't you stop comparing apples to oranges? Due to union contracts, some teachers are extremely overpaid compared to others who get screwed. Why don't you fix that problem first? Teachers teach our children that once High School is over, your life is going to suck. Work is going to suck. The only thing you'll have to look forward to after the prom and the homecoming football game is the weekend on the couch with a beer and sports on TV. Nobody teaches children that a job can be fun. You wonder why people choose to give their money to athletes instead of teachers? Please, spare me. This is not a wealth redistribution problem like you imply. It's a social engineering problem, and any solution will take generations to work. If you treat it as some moral injustice you'll just perpetuate the cycle or move the problem elsewhere.
Doctors are taught never to identify with the person behind the disease they're treating.
I fail to see how this is bad. Would the world be a better place if all of our doctors were clinically depressed and in institutions after a few years of service? Due to human nature our society depends on objectivity to survive. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. Sometimes an individual has to be sacraficed for the good of the many. Sometimes you just can't save sombody. It sucks, but that's life. You have to distance yourself at a personal level from the reality if you want to maintain your sanity and continue to make good decisions.
Racism is rampant, keeping certain people from getting ahead just because of where their family comes from. In Ireland, people are killed over how to worship the same god.
Hard work can solve this problem? I doubt it. We've worked at it hard for centuries. These problems will not go away until people are willing to throw away their culture. Ironically, the same people who are interested in seeing problems like this solved are the same types of people who go out of their way to preserve cultures that are dying. Racial and religious barriers that have been overcome have been overcome at the expense of the culture of both sides. I think it's a great tradeoff, but do you? Does everybody?
In China, female children are thrown in the river because of a phallocentric ideology.
Here's another one where you have to make a choice between forgetting a culture to save lives, or preserving our history. No, you can't do both. Does the answer seem so obvious anymore? How many lives would be lost to get people who are so bound to cultural expectations that they would drown their own child to abandon that culture?
Now that I've been antagonizing you, here's the real point. Even with all those problems, do we still need to give up on stopping big rocks from killing us? Aren't there enough people on this planet such that plenty of people can work on all the problems? Can we a s a society persue multiple goals at the same time? If not, why not tackle the problems we know we can find an answer to (moving big rocks) while we're still coming to terms with the realities of the problems that don't have answers everybody will agree with (see above).
The reason that some people write their best code at 4:27 in the morning is because they slack off and don't do their homework until 4:00 AM the night before it's due, and it therefore becomes the only code they're writing. If it's the only code, it must be the bset code.
Look at it again in 6 years when you know what you're doing and see if it still seems so good. I know I'm embarrased by what I though was good code back then.