Nothing that supports the RIAA and other corrupters of government can be reasonably called good by a person comitted to the general welfare.
I do not support the way RIAA is exercising its rights, but let me point out that if we throw out intellectual property rights wholesale, we make the GPL unenforceable. The ability to sue people who abuse intellectual property is the only thing that makes it possible to protect free software.
If RIAA is thrown out of court in the file-sharing cases, then the same grounds can (and will) be used to throw out cases against people who take GPL software and incorporate it in to closed-source distributions.
You make a very good point about the difference between intellectual and physical property. I argue that if the creation of intellectual property and its protection by law can be called social engineering (and I believe it can), then so can the creation of physical property and its protection.
That doesn't mean that I believe that all social engineering is equally legitimate. There is good and bad social engineering, so merely that calling something social engineering does not make it bad.
Personally, I don't like suing 12-year-olds for trafficking in contraband IP, but the argument against this practice must be put on a firmer basis if it's going to gain any legitimacy.
This is nothing more than a tactic designed to instill fear into file-sharers, call it an attempt at Social Engineering.
To the extent that making and enforcing laws is "social engineering," you're right. The whole concept of private property is social engineering (see Locke's Two Treatises of Government for a detailed explanation). Most of us approve the sort of social engineering that gives us government, laws, and property. Under this system, "instilling fear" into lawbreakers is exactly what lawsuits and criminal prosecutions are about. It's called deterrence. This is one of the principal purposes of the law.
Living in NYC, I must admit to thinking that the 9/11 fund for victims is looking like nothing so much as a feeding trough for laywers.
How so? The whole point of the fund for victims was that the government pays restitution in exchange for the victims waiving their right to sue anyone other than the terrorists. Seems to me that this is designed to cut the lawyers out of the loop.
On other topics:
While it may be a useful function to institutionalise aid, the notion that one has an entitlement to it is just wrongheaded.
You've got the right to argue that life is hard and unfair, but my point of view is that we instituted civilization precisely to make life easier and fairer than it was in nature. As Hobbes wrote, life before civilization tended to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." As well as unfair, I might add.
One end of the "life is unfair" spectrum would say that if you are robbed or your mother is raped, you can go after the miscreants yourself but you aren't entitled to have the police catch them for you. I prefer a society where we do have an entitlement to have police and the courts help us defend and avenge ourselves, to have firemen put out fires in our houses, and perhaps to have government compensate people for misfortunes they suffer.
There's nothing wrong with your position---we just have different preferences, but I don't think that things are as absolute as I think you are saying: I doubt that you would assert that nobody has an entitlement to any help when he suffers a misfortune nor would I assert that somebody has an entitlement to infinite recompense. It's all a question of where we draw the line on how much help it's reasonable to be entitled to.
You make good points and I agree with some of what you say. In case you find this exchange interesting, I will push an opposing point of view, but please don't take it as a dismissal of the value in what you say. I agree with you more than the comments below would indicate, but I take a more extreme position here just to make the debate interesting.
A lot of the money for 9/11 goes to pay people who already have millions, so I would not call them needy. It is formulated as restitution because the awards are based on lost earnings (i.e., greater, the more money the victim was earning), so millionaire bond traders are elegible for many times more than the kitchen workers and secretaries.
To follow your example of the water heater, if a tornado or hurricane comes through town, you may be elegible for money from FEMA, but if a murderer kills the breadwinner of the family, you're not. Why are people hit by hurricanes more deserving than those hit by murderers?
True, but my point is that teenagers are able to understand that their actions have consequences. Failure to hold kids responsible for their actions leads to teenagers who don't think about consequences before acting.
But the kids did take full responsibility for their actions. According to the fine article, they pled guilty, expressed regret, and acknowledged that they had been stupid and wrong to shoot those cars.
Who is failing to hold the kids responsible?
The question here is that the kids did millions of dollars worth of damage to the victims and don't have the money to pay for it. In these circumstances, should we declare, "Victims are shit out of luck" or should we compensate them?
One approach would be to raise taxes and have the government compensate the victims, but many people don't like taxes, so a number of conservative judges such as Richard Posner (appointed by President Reagan to the Federal Bench) in the 1960s and 70s put forward the idea that if courts handed down liability judgments against people they felt could most efficiently have prevented bad things from happening, whether or not the people were at any moral fault then the magic of the free market would lead those actors to take extra care to make sure nobody got hurt.
The theory is that if the makers of GTA are stuck with a multimillion dollar judgment, they will work extra hard to make sure stupid kids don't take inspiration from their game and go shooting random motorists.
You can believe this theory or not, but it is an awfully appealing alternative to raising taxes in order to compensate victims.
You're missing the point. The kids accepted responsibility: they pled guilty to all charges. The problem is that the parents of the kids don't have enough money to compensate the victims adequately. The people suing are not the parents of the perps. It's the victims:
"I have eight bullet fragments all in my body," said 19-year-old Kimberly Bede, of Moneta, Va., who was hit in the pelvis as she rode in the passenger seat of her boyfriend's car. "The bullet entered my hip and I'm still receiving medical treatment."
The question at hand is justice for the victims: who should pay for medical bills, lost earnings, etc.? The perpetrators cannot because they don't have enough money, so if someone else contributed to the crime, then should the taxpayers pick up the tab of compensating the victims? Should we say that victims are SOL because compensating them for being shot would raise taxes or make video games more expensive?
Give me a good answer about who should compensate victims for being shot by little shits who can't pay for the damage they wreak.
Imagine for a moment that a spammer promoting penile enlargement pills for $29.95 a bottle sends out ten million spams - a very moderate number by modern standards. If the spammer gets one thousandth of one percent sales response (.001%), he will sell 10,000 bottles, for a total return of $299,500.00. Even on response rates as small as one millionth of one percent, operations like this can still turn a profit that makes them worthwhile, simply because of the enormous number of addresses that can be reached at almost no cost.
Last time I checked 0.001% of 10^7 was 100, not 10,000. The spammer would sell 100 bottles for a total return of $2,950, not a huge haul.
At one one millionth of a percent response, he would sell on average one tenth of a bottle.
If a user is stupid enough that his first instinct is to send a large file via E-mail (or every file), I can hardly imagine that user being able to set up a web or FTP server.
First, nobody said anything about large files. Lots of people transfer small files by email all the time. As to stupidity & large files, one professor I work with, who holds named chairs in both physics and engineering, has the habit of sending 20 megabyte power-point files to large numbers of people at least three times a week. I sincerely doubt you'd win an "I'm smart and you're stupid" competition with this guy.
Second, Windows systems generally come with http and ftp servers installed. All the student has to do is bring up the configuration panel and click on the "Start Service" button. It even has a GUI to build a cheesy default page.
If you want to figure out how to set security options you need to dig deep into the documentation, but turning the servers on is dead easy.
Email should be used for communication, not for transfering files.
The problem with prohibiting email attachments is that this essentially pushes students in the direction of running servers on their personal computers in order to transfer files. This would be a much larger security hole.
If they're running Windows, they're likely to use the servers that come with the OS (http or ftp), which have much worse greater potential security holes than the email reader.
Um, what photo??? I see an illustration but no photo??
He saw a photo credit at the bottom of the page and didn't realize that it referred to this photo instead of the illustration at the top of the article.
Uhm... the price of oil might be a pretty good indicator...
How so? Oil accounts for only 2% of the electricity generated in the US (coal produces 55%, nuclear 20%, hydro 11%, and gas 8.5%). Oil prices are determined largely by demand for transport, which consumes 61% of the petroleum used in the US.
Would you conclude that this does mean that wind will replace coal as source of electricity in the near future? I would not jump to such a conclusion. Commodity prices are very poor indicators of future demand.
According to Branigin's testimony, Captain Ronny Johnson, in charge of the troops manning the checkpoint, ordered them to fire a warning shot.
"Fire a warning shot," he told them as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. "Stop [messing] around!" Capt Johnson yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice: "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"
That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon's Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard.
"Cease fire!" Capt Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader, "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!"
The Washington Post said that 15 Iraqis were packed inside a Toyota car, along with as many possessions as the vehicle could hold.
Ten of them, including five children who appeared to be under five years old, were killed on the spot when the high-explosive rounds slammed into their target, Capt Johnson's company reported. Of the five others, one man was so severely injured that medics said he was not expected to live.
"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and I hope I never see it again," Sgt Mario Manzano, 26, an Army medic with Bravo Company of the division's 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, said later in an interview. He said one of the wounded women sat in the vehicle holding the mangled bodies of two of her children. "She didn't want to get out of the car," he said.
Part of running a checkpoint competently is to let civilians know what it is and how they should behave there. This was clearly not done in the early days of the occupation.
I agree that soldiers must protect themselves, but it is clear that there were a number of incidents in which they just did not run the checkpoints competently and their incompetence put them in the position of having to shoot unarmed civilians because they had not bothered to get things right when they set up the checkpoints.
Come on! Dont' you think it would be dramatic to go save Jessica Lynch? Unlike traditional war games, there would be no enemy soldiers and no killing. The object would be not to let reporters see that the hospital is filled with unarmed civilians offering to help you find her and take her home.
Sound does not give white noise, but thermal noise on a perfect resistor is perfectly white. An imperfect resistor can produce an excellent approximation of white noise within a fairly large bandwidth.
As to working on the problem for decades, excellent commercial analog white-noise generators have been available for half a century or more. The only problem is making a very cheap white noise source that can be digitized conveniently.
No. You're not supposed to trust commercial distros! If you're going to trust commercial software, you might as well trust Microsoft. Only trust hand-compiled software.
Read all the FSF source and understand it. When you're sure it's safe, hand-execute the build-cycle for the linux kernel and gcc. Enter the resulting binary into your computer using the toggle switches on the front panel (you did hand-build your computer to be sure the manufacturer didn't sneak anything malicious into the ROMS, didn't you?). Then, and only then, can you build the rest of the distribution without the risk of a trojan compiler.
The great advantage of free or open-source software for the superconduting lead hat paranoid is that you can't do a clean build like this for Windows. Only if you have the source can you be sure your compiler is not sneaking malicious op-codes into your machine.
In most of the United States, unless you are in a union, you have almost no rights in this situation. Except for a small number of protected categories (race, sex, religion), any other criterion, no matter how stupid, is grounds for firing you. You can fire someone for their political beliefs, their taste in music, an unsubstantiated suspicion that you are not trustworthy. Whatever.
Hiring a lawyer would not do you any good because even if you could prove that you were innocent, the boss could still fire you because he didn't like the way you disagreed with him when he accused you of hacking the treasury.
So long as the employer didn't use your race, religion, sex, or disability as a reason, you're SOL.
Similarly, whether you're a guy or not, the mitochondrial DNA comes only from the mother and should be uniform.
The problem is that if you restrict the RFLPS analysis to a single chromosome or to mitochondrial DNA alone, the statistical weight is significantly diminished.
For instance, your Y chromosome would be, aside from spontaneous mutations, identical to the Y chromosomes of all your great-great-great-...-great grandfather's descendents along a purely male line of descent. Since spontaneous mutation rates are quite small, over time this produces a huge population whose Y chromosomes have identical distributions of DNA fragment lengths, thus reducing the statistical weight of a Y-chromosome match trememdously compared to the weight of a match of fragments from all 46 chromosomes.
LaTex is a crufty document markup language hacked on top of a very limited language used for page processing.
Leslie Lamport and Donald Knuth have both commented in print that TeX's text-rewriting macro engine sucks. Knuth thought that people shouldn't be using a macro language very much, but hand-tuning their typography (including hand-adjusting each underfull box until it passes the tolerance test, and rewriting your text to make it fit if you get stuck). Lamport said that if he had one do-over with LaTeX, he would not have taken seriously Knuth's statement that TeX78 --> TeX82 would only be a minior change. If he had known how much rewriting Knuth was planning, he would have asked for a more serious language than the text-substitution script engine.
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I do not support the way RIAA is exercising its rights, but let me point out that if we throw out intellectual property rights wholesale, we make the GPL unenforceable. The ability to sue people who abuse intellectual property is the only thing that makes it possible to protect free software.
If RIAA is thrown out of court in the file-sharing cases, then the same grounds can (and will) be used to throw out cases against people who take GPL software and incorporate it in to closed-source distributions.
That doesn't mean that I believe that all social engineering is equally legitimate. There is good and bad social engineering, so merely that calling something social engineering does not make it bad.
Personally, I don't like suing 12-year-olds for trafficking in contraband IP, but the argument against this practice must be put on a firmer basis if it's going to gain any legitimacy.
To the extent that making and enforcing laws is "social engineering," you're right. The whole concept of private property is social engineering (see Locke's Two Treatises of Government for a detailed explanation). Most of us approve the sort of social engineering that gives us government, laws, and property. Under this system, "instilling fear" into lawbreakers is exactly what lawsuits and criminal prosecutions are about. It's called deterrence. This is one of the principal purposes of the law.
How so? The whole point of the fund for victims was that the government pays restitution in exchange for the victims waiving their right to sue anyone other than the terrorists. Seems to me that this is designed to cut the lawyers out of the loop.
On other topics:
You've got the right to argue that life is hard and unfair, but my point of view is that we instituted civilization precisely to make life easier and fairer than it was in nature. As Hobbes wrote, life before civilization tended to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." As well as unfair, I might add.One end of the "life is unfair" spectrum would say that if you are robbed or your mother is raped, you can go after the miscreants yourself but you aren't entitled to have the police catch them for you. I prefer a society where we do have an entitlement to have police and the courts help us defend and avenge ourselves, to have firemen put out fires in our houses, and perhaps to have government compensate people for misfortunes they suffer.
There's nothing wrong with your position---we just have different preferences, but I don't think that things are as absolute as I think you are saying: I doubt that you would assert that nobody has an entitlement to any help when he suffers a misfortune nor would I assert that somebody has an entitlement to infinite recompense. It's all a question of where we draw the line on how much help it's reasonable to be entitled to.
A lot of the money for 9/11 goes to pay people who already have millions, so I would not call them needy. It is formulated as restitution because the awards are based on lost earnings (i.e., greater, the more money the victim was earning), so millionaire bond traders are elegible for many times more than the kitchen workers and secretaries.
To follow your example of the water heater, if a tornado or hurricane comes through town, you may be elegible for money from FEMA, but if a murderer kills the breadwinner of the family, you're not. Why are people hit by hurricanes more deserving than those hit by murderers?
So do I gather that you're opposed to the federal government's program of making restitution to the victims of 9/11?
But the kids did take full responsibility for their actions. According to the fine article, they pled guilty, expressed regret, and acknowledged that they had been stupid and wrong to shoot those cars.
Who is failing to hold the kids responsible?
The question here is that the kids did millions of dollars worth of damage to the victims and don't have the money to pay for it. In these circumstances, should we declare, "Victims are shit out of luck" or should we compensate them?
One approach would be to raise taxes and have the government compensate the victims, but many people don't like taxes, so a number of conservative judges such as Richard Posner (appointed by President Reagan to the Federal Bench) in the 1960s and 70s put forward the idea that if courts handed down liability judgments against people they felt could most efficiently have prevented bad things from happening, whether or not the people were at any moral fault then the magic of the free market would lead those actors to take extra care to make sure nobody got hurt.
The theory is that if the makers of GTA are stuck with a multimillion dollar judgment, they will work extra hard to make sure stupid kids don't take inspiration from their game and go shooting random motorists.
You can believe this theory or not, but it is an awfully appealing alternative to raising taxes in order to compensate victims.
The question at hand is justice for the victims: who should pay for medical bills, lost earnings, etc.? The perpetrators cannot because they don't have enough money, so if someone else contributed to the crime, then should the taxpayers pick up the tab of compensating the victims? Should we say that victims are SOL because compensating them for being shot would raise taxes or make video games more expensive?
Give me a good answer about who should compensate victims for being shot by little shits who can't pay for the damage they wreak.
Last time I checked 0.001% of 10^7 was 100, not 10,000. The spammer would sell 100 bottles for a total return of $2,950, not a huge haul.
At one one millionth of a percent response, he would sell on average one tenth of a bottle.
First, nobody said anything about large files. Lots of people transfer small files by email all the time. As to stupidity & large files, one professor I work with, who holds named chairs in both physics and engineering, has the habit of sending 20 megabyte power-point files to large numbers of people at least three times a week. I sincerely doubt you'd win an "I'm smart and you're stupid" competition with this guy.
Second, Windows systems generally come with http and ftp servers installed. All the student has to do is bring up the configuration panel and click on the "Start Service" button. It even has a GUI to build a cheesy default page.
If you want to figure out how to set security options you need to dig deep into the documentation, but turning the servers on is dead easy.
The problem with prohibiting email attachments is that this essentially pushes students in the direction of running servers on their personal computers in order to transfer files. This would be a much larger security hole.
If they're running Windows, they're likely to use the servers that come with the OS (http or ftp), which have much worse greater potential security holes than the email reader.
That's cool. Then when his shares on the terrorism futures market spike, he can IPO.
He saw a photo credit at the bottom of the page and didn't realize that it referred to this photo instead of the illustration at the top of the article.
How so? Oil accounts for only 2% of the electricity generated in the US (coal produces 55%, nuclear 20%, hydro 11%, and gas 8.5%). Oil prices are determined largely by demand for transport, which consumes 61% of the petroleum used in the US.
If we look at coal prices, we see that indeed they have fallen steadily over time and are projected to continue falling for the next few decades.
Would you conclude that this does mean that wind will replace coal as source of electricity in the near future? I would not jump to such a conclusion. Commodity prices are very poor indicators of future demand.
I agree that soldiers must protect themselves, but it is clear that there were a number of incidents in which they just did not run the checkpoints competently and their incompetence put them in the position of having to shoot unarmed civilians because they had not bothered to get things right when they set up the checkpoints.
Come on! Dont' you think it would be dramatic to go save Jessica Lynch? Unlike traditional war games, there would be no enemy soldiers and no killing. The object would be not to let reporters see that the hospital is filled with unarmed civilians offering to help you find her and take her home.
As to working on the problem for decades, excellent commercial analog white-noise generators have been available for half a century or more. The only problem is making a very cheap white noise source that can be digitized conveniently.
Read all the FSF source and understand it. When you're sure it's safe, hand-execute the build-cycle for the linux kernel and gcc. Enter the resulting binary into your computer using the toggle switches on the front panel (you did hand-build your computer to be sure the manufacturer didn't sneak anything malicious into the ROMS, didn't you?). Then, and only then, can you build the rest of the distribution without the risk of a trojan compiler.
The great advantage of free or open-source software for the superconduting lead hat paranoid is that you can't do a clean build like this for Windows. Only if you have the source can you be sure your compiler is not sneaking malicious op-codes into your machine.
Hiring a lawyer would not do you any good because even if you could prove that you were innocent, the boss could still fire you because he didn't like the way you disagreed with him when he accused you of hacking the treasury.
So long as the employer didn't use your race, religion, sex, or disability as a reason, you're SOL.
The problem is that if you restrict the RFLPS analysis to a single chromosome or to mitochondrial DNA alone, the statistical weight is significantly diminished.
For instance, your Y chromosome would be, aside from spontaneous mutations, identical to the Y chromosomes of all your great-great-great-...-great grandfather's descendents along a purely male line of descent. Since spontaneous mutation rates are quite small, over time this produces a huge population whose Y chromosomes have identical distributions of DNA fragment lengths, thus reducing the statistical weight of a Y-chromosome match trememdously compared to the weight of a match of fragments from all 46 chromosomes.
The same argument holds for mitochondrial DNA.
Ron Graham doesn't have the geek recognition factor that Knuth has, but is certainly quite well known in maths.
What do you have against Oren Patashnik?
Leslie Lamport and Donald Knuth have both commented in print that TeX's text-rewriting macro engine sucks. Knuth thought that people shouldn't be using a macro language very much, but hand-tuning their typography (including hand-adjusting each underfull box until it passes the tolerance test, and rewriting your text to make it fit if you get stuck). Lamport said that if he had one do-over with LaTeX, he would not have taken seriously Knuth's statement that TeX78 --> TeX82 would only be a minior change. If he had known how much rewriting Knuth was planning, he would have asked for a more serious language than the text-substitution script engine.
Could explain how the EDG comments have been disproven? Can you provide some pointers to where I could read more about the disproofs?